Reply to Cicchetti, Kaufman, and Sparrow

The aim of the review of D.V. Cicchetti, A.S. Kaufman, and S.S. Sparrow (funded by the General Electric Company; this issue) is "to evaluate [the] literature relating the effects of prenatal and postnatal exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) upon neurobehavioral, health-related, and cognitive deficits in neonates, developing infants, children, and adults" (p. 589) on the basis of data derived from seven cohorts. One of these cohorts is the Dutch PCB/dioxin study. The paper of Cicchetti et al. presents a long, winding exercise in criticizing aspects of the design of the seven studies. Here we will give a comment on their review, as far as it concerns our own work. We applied the six fundamental sets of scientific criteria as proposed by Cichetti et al.