gee rachel i hope you send this letter to the journal with one change - monitor to moron in the last paragraph,LOL. pat in snj (with broken R wrist, hard to type capitals)
On 09/28/15, Rachel Myr wrote:
I've just had a quick read of this 'paper' and am not impressed.
First, it seems almost to be a term paper for a statistics course in which
there was a gross discrepancy between the students' abilities to formulate
useful research questions and the access given them to a large database
along with the capability to perform no end of statistical analyses on the
data. The words used in the research questions violate basic principles of
scientific thought - they sought to 'confirm' other findings, rather than
to 'examine' or 'scrutinize' or 'attempt to illuminate' and by this choice
of words they seem to me to reveal an unacceptable bias at the outset.
The manuscript has not been adequately proofread so if it has been accepted
for publication without further revision, the journal or forum for
publication doesn't impress me either. The tables and much of the text are
nearly impenetrable to this reader. Call me grumpy but I have come to
regard impenetrable prose as a strong indicator of an impenetrable mind and
I don't mean that as a compliment.
In the 'Discussion' section, they do not question their original claim that
the group of subjects were demographically representative for the UK,
despite the children consisting only of twins, who ranged in gestational
ages at birth from 27 to 43 weeks, with a mean of 36.5 weeks. Yes, in some
demographics they might be representative, such as place of residence, and
socioeconomic status of the parents, but the authors (I will not call them
researchers!) don't seem to have entertained the notion that findings from
twins can not necessarily be generalized to singletons, nor that findings
from premature babies cannot be generalized to term babies.
They also make no mention of their failure to consider that virtually all
effects of breastfeeding have been amply demonstrated to be dose-related,
and that fact
should have been reflected in the design of the study. Rather, the authors
seem to use breastfeeding as a binary variable ('ever breastfed' or 'never
breastfed'), revealing a 'limited' (actually, 'no') understanding of the
nature of breastfeeding and of the importance of classifying variables
correctly for research purposes. Researchers worth their salt would have
known that. Both authors, incredibly, seem to have PhD degrees.
Since this article appears to be more of an exercise in number massage
rather than an actual investigation into the effect of breastfeeding on IQ
development, we should not be surprised that they have failed to consider
differences in exposure to the independent variable (breastfeeding) on the
dependent variable (IQ development). It is regrettable that they have
gotten any press coverage at all. My suspicion is that some industry-funded
monitor picked up the title when it was registered at the academic
institution the authors are associated with and put the full force of its
PR-machinery behind it to get it out to the mass media. Alternatively the
authors could be funded by industry directly though the unsophisticated
level of writing makes me doubt this. The paper certainly does not deserve
much attention on content alone; it makes a negligible contribution to our
body of knowledge about BF effects on intelligence.
Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway
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