SMOKING MOTHERS HAVE FATTER KIDS

But not unhealthy kids or dumber kids. Isn't reality nasty? It keeps upsetting people's nice simple theories. Are you surprised that you have not heard of this one from the media?

The study below was notable for the high degree of statistical control used so is not readily criticized

Maternal Smoking during Pregnancy and Children's Cognitive and Physical Development: A Causal Risk Factor?

By Stephen E. Gilman et al.

There remains considerable debate regarding the effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy on children's growth and development. Evidence that exposure to maternal smoking during pregnancy is associated with numerous adverse outcomes is contradicted by research suggesting that these associations are spurious. The authors investigated the relation between maternal smoking during pregnancy and 14 developmental outcomes of children from birth through age 7 years, using data from the Collaborative Perinatal Project (1959-1974; n = 52,919). In addition to adjusting for potential confounders measured contemporaneously with maternal smoking, the authors fitted conditional fixed-effects models among siblings that controlled for unmeasured confounders. Results from the conditional analyses indicated a birth weight difference of -85.63 g associated with smoking of ~20 cigarettes daily during pregnancy (95% confidence interval: -131.91, -39.34) and 2.73 times' higher odds of being overweight at age 7 years (95% confidence interval: 1.30, 5.71). However, the associations between maternal smoking and 12 other outcomes studied (including Apgar score, intelligence, academic achievement, conduct problems, and asthma) were entirely eliminated after adjustment for measured and unmeasured confounders. The authors conclude that the hypothesized effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy on these outcomes either are not present or are not distinguishable from a broader range of familial factors associated with maternal smoking.

American Journal of Epidemiology 2008 168(5):522-531




RESEARCHERS NOT ADMITTING THEIR MADE-UP DATA

The authors below are far too polite to say that but that is what their findings show. Dreadful of me to put it so bluntly, isn't it?

Use of Multiple Imputation in the Epidemiologic Literature

By Mark A. Klebanoff and Stephen R. Cole

The authors attempted to catalog the use of procedures to impute missing data in the epidemiologic literature and to determine the degree to which imputed results differed in practice from unimputed results. The full text of articles published in 2005 and 2006 in four leading epidemiologic journals was searched for the text imput. Sixteen articles utilizing multiple imputation, inverse probability weighting, or the expectation-maximization algorithm to impute missing data were found. The small number of relevant manuscripts and diversity of detail provided precluded systematic analysis of the use of imputation procedures. To form a bridge between current and future practice, the authors suggest details that should be included in articles that utilize these procedures

American Journal of Epidemiology 2008 168(4):355-357