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Poverty could also explain a drop in IQ seen in cannabis users, says a Norwegian researcher looking at a Dunedin study.
NZ City Tuesday 15 Jan 2013 Ole Rogeberg, in a paper released this week, says it could be too soon to blame cannabis use for the observed IQ drop in about 1000 participants, after he used a simulation model to show the same results could explained by poverty. "It would be too strong to say that the results have been discredited, but fair to say that the methodology is flawed and the causal inference drawn from the results premature." But Professor Richie Poulton, a co-author of the original research, released last year, rejected the argument that children's IQs are temporarily boosted by schooling and fall to their former low level when they leave school. The research still showed a drop in IQ for cannabis users from middle class families and the IQs of the children from the poorer families were not boosted by schooling, he said. However, University of Queensland's Professor Annette Dobson, a biostatistician, says the approaches differ between these two papers, reflecting the authors' backgrounds - Mr Rogeberg an economist and the original authors specialising in psychology and psychiatry. The original researchers did not consider variables such as socioeconomic status, and their statistical analyses relied heavily on strong and untested assumptions, she said. "For example, they assume a simple linear relationship between the duration of marijuana smoking and the change in IQ, and their results do not show clearly how confident we can be in the magnitude of the results. Prof Dobson also said the Dunedin study was not large and just 153 ever met the criteria for cannabis dependence and 124 used cannabis regularly at one or more of the five surveys conducted. Similarly there was no data shown to support the assumption that the pattern is the same for women and men, who are bigger cannabis users. http://home.nzcity.co.nz/news/article.aspx?id=159951&fm=newsmain%2Cnrhl
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