The smartness of the children we have on this planet is something to wonder, there’s a new test that could potentially give us the answers we’ve been craving. Cardiff University scientists have figured out a way to potentially see if a child is at risk of having a lower IQ, which is quite the development. They had found that children under the age of seven whom had a common genetic variation were at risk of having a lower IQ.
The thing they were looking at was the impaired thyroid functions in impacted patients, which had the chance of developing an IQ of under 85 (which, of course, isn’t very ideal). A new portion of this particular study had scientists from both Cardiff and Bristol University looking at the numbers from 3,123 different children under the age of seven; these children also had their IQ’s tested.
The children who had thyroid hormone levels around the lower range (the lower range of the normal scale that is) were definitely at risk. Dr. Peter Taylor from Cardiff had this to say about the matter, “If other studies can confirm our finding then there may be benefit in carrying out a genetic test for this gene variant in addition to the standard neonatal thyroid screening, which would identify children most at risk of developing low IQ”.
Dr. Taylor continued on saying, “Children with satisfactory thyroid hormone levels toether with the genetic variant have normal IQ levels, which raises the possibility that children at risk could be treated with standard thyroid hormone tablets to compensate for impaired thyroid hormone processing.” It seems as if thyroid problems play a rather large role in the IQ development of children, which could allow scientists to pin point the problem before it even starts.
No comments:
Post a Comment