Do severe allergies correlate with aptitude in mathematics and music?

[bibliophage]

Friday’s Wall Street Journal has a column (“Science Journal”) by Sharon Begley on page B1. There she says

What’s really intriguing is the association between seemingly bad genes and good ones. My favorite is the link between having severe allergies and being adept at math and music.

That’s news to me. What was the study that reached that conclusion? How do they know (if they do) that the correlation is a genetic effect and not an environmental one?

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

It’s news to me, too, but evidently she’s not just making it up. Google, “allergies math music”.

http://www.allergicchild.com/giftedness_and_allergies.htm

Many parents of severely allergic children have noticed a clustering of certain abilities and disabilities that their children have.

This clustering was also noticed by a noted neurologist, Norman Geschwind, and written about in the book, “Gifted Children: Myths and Realities” by Ellen Winner. She writes, “Geschwind was intrigued by his observation that individuals with high right-hemisphere abilities (this would include the spatial domains of math, music, and art) tended to be non-right-handed…Geschwind noted that these individuals also had a higher-than average frequency of linguistic deficits –dyslexia, stuttering, delayed language acquisition, even autism, which is associated with impaired language. And they had a higher-than-average frequency of immune system disorders such as asthma and allergies. Geschwind noted that these traits sometimes clustered within individuals, or, if not in individuals, in families.” He further noted that these children were more often males with these combinations of abilities and disabilities.

I have no clue how reliable the study is, or whether it’s been clinically confirmed or is just somebody’s pet theory.

[samclem]

http://www.megafoundation.org/Ubiquity/May00/BookReview1_5.html

While not what you are looking for, I thought her statement in "Myth #5, summed it up. Obviously, you need to get her book and look at the cites.

[Primaflora]

Winner’s book is good and worth a read if you are remotely interested in ideas about gifted education.

I heard Linda Silverman ( http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/ ) speak a few years back and she mentioned that they were seeing correlations between allergies and severely gifted kids. I’ve never seen a study showing the difference in incidence between kids with high IQ or musical aptitude and those without though. I’d also like to see a study which compares allergies, dyslexia, autism and severe giftedness and kids who are dyslexic and not gifted. Apparently there is a higher incidence of autoimmune disorder in kids with autism in any case.

[Max_Torque]

My knee-jerk reaction is, “No, allergies correlates to a tendency to spend more hours indoors, which means the kid has to figure out ways other than playing outside to keep himself busy, such as books, math, and music.”

But what do I know, I’m no scientist.

[pool]

Actually this makes perfect sense. Per the hygiene hypothesis there are rising cases of autoimmune disorders, allergies, inflammatory disease, autism, asthma, etc. The reason being is that modern humans are too clean in this overly sanitized world, we are not exposed to certain pathogens, parasitic worms (helminths) that in our ancestors played an important part in the development of the immune system. Autism for instance is often correlated with mathematic or musical ability. Approximately 25% of cases of autism are Maternal autoantibody related (MAR) Autism. In this process the mom who usually has some sort of autoimmune disorder carries the antibodies that attack the developing fetal brain leading to autism. So it makes sense to me that asthma would also be correlated to an aptitude for mathematics and music. I’ve often heard it theorized that Isaac Newton was likely Autistic and obviously he was a mathematical genius. Any Thoughts?

[Smeghead]

I just did eight or ten PubMed searches for various word combinations and didn’t see any papers describing studies that would be relevant to this. I even looked up “Geschwind N”, and though I didn’t have time to go through all the results, the first page didn’t look promising.

[Quercus]

@pool

Actually this makes perfect sense. Per the hygiene hypothesis there are rising cases of autoimmune disorders, allergies, inflammatory disease, autism, asthma, etc. The reason being is that modern humans are too clean in this overly sanitized world, we are not exposed to certain pathogens, parasitic worms (helminths) that in our ancestors played an important part in the development of the immune system. Autism for instance is often correlated with mathematic or musical ability. Approximately 25% of cases of autism are Maternal autoantibody related (MAR) Autism. In this process the mom who usually has some sort of autoimmune disorder carries the antibodies that attack the developing fetal brain leading to autism. So it makes sense to me that asthma would also be correlated to an aptitude for mathematics and music. I’ve often heard it theorized that Isaac Newton was likely Autistic and obviously he was a mathematical genius. Any Thoughts?

My thought is that it might make sense to find out if there really is a connection before coming up with possible ideas why there might be. And by ‘find out’ I mean some objective study, not ‘gosh, I’ve noticed that, too’, find-what-you’re-looking for anecdotes.

[D18]

I’d assume zombies aren’t good in math or music, but do they have allergies?

[Hari_Seldon]

I have never had an allergy. Hell, I don’t even get much of a rash from poison ivy and I’m usually insensitive to mosquito bites. I have no talent from music, but quite a lot for math. More to the point, I have no idea that many of my colleagues suffer from, say, asthma or hay fever. I call bullshit.

[DSeid]

Old thread but still …

What I can find shows the reverse.

Clinical studies have reported an increase of symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder (CD), stress, anxiety, and depression in allergic children and adults (3–11). According to a recent meta-analysis (1), psychosocial factors (i.e. psychologic stress, poor social support, and behavioral problems) have been associated with the onset of ‘atopic disorders’ (mainly asthma) in 17 cohort studies. On the other hand, ‘atopic disorders’ have been linked to several mental health disturbances (i.e. psychologic distress, anxiety, panic disorders, and depressive symptoms) in six cohort studies (1).

However, the possible underlying mechanisms are unknown. One hypothesis is that both disorders share common pathophysiologic pathways. Thus, deregulation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), the basis of several psychologic disorders, including those related to stress management, may affect the immunological system (1, 3). But on another hand, the allergic symptoms could also affect the child neurodevelopment because of the clinical manifestations and corresponding treatments (1, 4). …

… In this cohort study, we found that scorings of general cognition and social competence at the age of 4 were inversely associated with atopy at the age of 6 … This suggests the existence of direct physiologic pathways involved in the association between neurobehavior and atopy, maybe sharing genetic influences. Altered HPA function and allergic disorders may be part of these pathways, probably secondary to gene–environment interactions (1, 3, 5). …

IOW this study suggests that not only are allergies associated with poorer cognitive function but that the poorer cognitive function appears to manifest first.

That said I also found a couple of old studies that looked at gifted males and found a higher incidence of allergies in them. (This one for example.)