Dutch scientists have discovered your mother is to blame for your bad math tests

HAVE ever wondered that despite how hard you try you always fail at maths? Well, scientists have found the answer. And it might not be your fault.

TWO plus two equals four.

Four plus four equals eight.

The square route of eight divided by pi multiplied by the square root of something else ...

Don’t know the answer? Well, fear not. It might not be your fault. Dutch scientists have discovered that it’s probably your mum’s.

For five years researchers from VU University Medical Centre in The Netherlands followed the development of more than 1100 children from birth and found children born to mothers who had low levels of the thyroid hormone thyroxine during pregnancy were two thirds more likely to perform badly in arithmetic tests.

Previous studies had already shown that low levels of the thyroxine in pregnant women was linked to poor mental development in their children, however it was never clear how this affected a child’s performance, until now.

Details of the discovery were published in the European Journal of Endocrinology today.

Researchers began the study by recording the level of thyroxine in pregnant women during their first trimester (12 weeks).

Then, when the children turned five, they looked at their test scores for both language and maths.

What they found was the children whose mothers had very low levels of thyroxine (the lowest 10 per cent) at the end of the first trimester were almost twice (1.9 times) as likely to score a subnormal mark in an arithmetic test than children whose mothers had normal thyroxine levels during early pregnancy.

When they took into account the family background and their variation in health at birth this was reduced to 1.6 times — meaning they were actually 60 per cent more likely to score a bad mark in a maths test.

However, the childrens’ language development was not affected.

The study compared the maths test results of all the children to those of their peers at school.

A bad result was deemed as placing in the lower half of the class.

The lead author of the study, Dr Martijn Finken said while the results proved low thyroxine levels in pregnancy affected a child’s ability to solve maths problems, it was not known if it affected them for life.

“Whether these problems persist into adulthood remains to be seen,” Dr Finken said. “We will continue to follow these children to answer this next big question.”

Dr Finken also said the results of the study also opened up the possibility of developing a hormone test to see if a child would need extra help in mathematics at school.

“It is possible that these children could benefit from hormonal supplements to boost their brain development in the womb” suggested Dr Finken. “Such treatment has been tried in the past but as yet has failed to improve cognitive ability.”