On 5 Apr 2004, Wallace E. Dixon, Jr. wrote:

>  All over the news today is a claim that, by implication, watching
>  TV in infancy basically causes attention problems in children.  Of course,
> the AAP doesn't say this, but that doesn't matter since the press is
> splattering ITS understanding of the claim all over the place, and
> this is the message people will take home with them.

The authors do make some interesting statements in their article, 
however, including:

"We have not in fact studied or found an association between 
television viewing and clinically diagnosed ADHD".

"We relied on parental report of television viewed".

"We cannot draw causal inferences from these associations".

(from the Pediatrics article, all on p. 711 at 
http://www.aap.org/advocacy/releases/tvapril.pdf)

I wonder how often those statements get reported in news summaries of 
the research. And I wonder how often the authors stress these points 
to journalists when they discuss the implications of their work. 

Sigh.

Stephen
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Stephen L. Black, Ph.D.            tel:  (819) 822-9600 ext 2470
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