Prenatal Alcohol Exposure

Pregnant alcoholic women risk the health of their offspring in multiple ways: (1) Exposure to alcohol during gestation may lead to fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) or fetal alcohol effects; (2) the physical consequences of alcoholism in the mother (e.g., falls or malnutrition) may independently affect the developing fetus; (3) genetic vulnerability to alcoholism in the fetus may increase the effects of prenatal exposure; and (4) the lifestyle of an alcoholic parent may lead to negative consequences for the fetus, the pregnancy, and the developing child. This article addresses the first of these issues - the effects of exposure to alcohol during gestation - in detail. However, any or all of the other issues listed (i.e., concomitant genetic background and the physical and lifestyle deficits that accompany alcoholism) may exacerbate the adverse effects of prenatal alcohol exposure.

As a teratogen, alcohol is capable of directly inducing developmental abnormalities in a fetus. Alcohol use during pregnancy is one of the most common known causes of preventable birth defects, and its results can persist as long-term deficits in physical and cognitive growth and development.

The dangers of fetal alcohol exposure, initially identified in the late 1960's, are entirely preventable if women abstain from drinking during pregnancy. Given this fact, in 198

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l exposure. In this study, researchers recruited adult women in their fourth month of pregnancy from a prenatal clinic. All women who consumed an average of three or more drinks per week during their first trimester, plus a random sample of one-third of the women who drank alcohol less often, were selected as study subjects. In general, alcohol use during pregnancy was light to moderate among the women participating in the study, although subjects who represented the entire spectrum of use were included in the sample. Growth Deficits Children with FAS are small for their age (Streissguth et al. 1991) - indeed, such smallness is one of the criteria for diagnosis, although growth deficits also are found among children who were exposed to alcohol during pregnancy but do not fulfill the full criteria for FAS. As noted previously, however. growth retardation is somewhat ameliorated at puberty. In the MHPCD project, these growth deficits are symmetrical, affecting height, weight, and head circumference to the same degree, and remain significant through age 10. The relationship between prenatal exposure and growth deficits is linear (i.e., the greater the prenatal alcohol exposure, the more pronounced the effect on postnatal growth). S
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Approximate Word count = 5488
Approximate Pages = 22 (250 words per page)

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