 Poor Performance in Children Related To Alcohol Ingestion During Pregnancy
Source: Reuters by Megan Rauscher Date: 2/25/2009
Looking at the overall pattern of alcohol consumption during pregnancy is better at predicting problems in the offspring than are individual alcohol-related risk factors, researchers have found.
"Our
research showed that a metric of drinking which included many
individual alcohol consumption measures better predicted poorer child
performance," Dr. Lisa M. Chiodo from Wayne State University in Detroit
told Reuters Health.
Based on the results, it would be useful
for doctors to evaluate "more than one of the several reliable and
valid measures of drinking that are available to more thoroughly assess
risk during pregnancy," she added.
An article describing the
study is currently available online and will be published in the April
issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
Chiodo
and her colleagues constructed a simple 'yes/no' metric of risky
prenatal alcohol use, based on information from well-validated
individual measures and standard screening tools. They tested the
metric in a sample of 75 African American mothers and their 4- to
5-year-old offspring.
The mothers responded to questions
assessing how much and how often they drank alcohol around the time
they conceived and during pregnancy, and the children underwent testing
of their IQ, attention, memory, visual-motor function, fine motor
skills, and behavior.
The metric identified more than 62 percent
of the mothers as drinking at risky levels -- 23 percent more than the
individual measures of risky drinking identified, the team found.
"We
had good reason to think that risk drinking was more common than
thought," Chiodo noted in a written statement, "so detecting more risk
drinkers was not that surprising."
"The real surprise," she
said, "was how successful the metric was in predicting deficits and
problems in the children. In fact, our metric predicted poor child
cognition and behavior problems better than any of the individual
measures of maternal alcohol consumption or screens for problem
drinking alone."
SOURCE: Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, online February 2009.
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