Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Effects of Prenatal Cocaine Exposure on IQ   posted by ben g @ 9/10/2008 07:13:00 PM
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In Obama's unexciting review of the Bell Curve, he remarked:

no one disputes that children whose mothers smoke crack when they're pregnant are going to have developmental problems.

The relevant studies reveal a more complex picture, though. The effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on IQ remain heavily contested to this day. However, recent evidence from Bennett et al points to a 3 to 5 IQ point drop, on average. This is the most recent study on this subject that I'm aware of.

Interestingly, in following with a few previous studies, it was found that boys suffer a greater cognitive loss from prenatal cocaine exposure than girls. Also, the study found that 9 year olds had equally fewer IQ points as their 4 year old counterparts, countering to a certain extent the idea that the IQ loss goes away as development progresses.

If Bennett's numbers are correct, they have small-- but significant-- implications for the Black-White IQ gap. Unlike tobacco and alcohol, which are used by pregnant white and black women at about equal rates and intensities on average*[1], black women are much more[2] likely than white women to use cocaine or crack while pregnant. This is relevant to behavioral genetic studies-- both past and present-- which have aimed to understand the relative contributions of genetics and environment to the IQ gaps. There is no way, as far as I know, to extract prenatal factors like cocaine use from measures of heritability without explicitly measuring such inputs. As far as adoption studies in particular, it stands to reason that women who place their babies up for adoption exceed the rest of the US population in pregnant cocaine use. An interesting thing about the Scarr adoption study is that all of the mothers of the half-black kids were white.

[1] Today, that is. 1989 was the earliest year I could find data for, and in that year the pattern is starkly different from today-- the black-white ratio in fetal alcohol syndrom for this year has way more alcohol use by pregnant black women than pregnant white women, and also much higher rates of fetal alcohol syndrome among black babies. I'm not sure if the rates were comparable in say the 70's, when the Scarr adoption study was performed. That would be interesting data if anyone happens to have it.

[2]~12 times more in the second link, from 1994

*Source for the alcohol/tobacco/fetal alcohol syndrome rates is the CDC.

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