Pesticides to Blame for Intelligence Gap, Expert Says

May 10, 2007— -- The lead researcher of a recent study showing poorer academic performance among children conceived during the summer says potential parents should be less concerned with watching their calendar and more concerned with watching their drinking water.

Paul Winchester of the Indiana University School of Medicine presented his controversial findings that children conceived between May and August did worse on the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress during a meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies May 7. On average, those conceived during the summer did 1 percent worse.

Winchester and his collaborators theorize that the lower performance results from the abundance of pesticides during the summer. In a second study, they showed that birth defects increase among children conceived during that same period.

"It's statistically significant, but you could argue it's not a clinically significant way [of measuring]," said Winchester.

Allen Wilcox, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, is one scientist making that argument.

"This is a very weak evidence for a causation," he said. "The best you could say is that it raises the hypothesis, but [it's] a far cry from what should cause a change in behavior."

Wilcox found several weaknesses in the study methods, including the fact that researchers reached their conclusion without any measurements of how much pesticide each individual child was exposed to in utero.

He also criticized the nature of the study. Seasonal studies, he said, are popular because of the relative ease in doing them and the appearance of value.

"On the face of it, it is interesting to lay people, but because it's an easy kind of analysis to do, you are susceptible to false positive results," said Wilcox. "It could be really good. It could be the next great thing. But in general, these kinds of studies haven't held up."

Russell Kirby of the University of Alabama School of Public Health emphasized that a lot more work would be needed before drawing the association between lower academic performance and pesticides. He also pointed out that even a proven association between the two in Indiana wouldn't necessarily apply to the nation, as growing seasons, and therefore pesticide spraying seasons, vary in different regions of the country.