Question: What are FAE, ARND, and ARDD?
Answer: Babies affected by alcohol can have some or all of the clinical signs of FAS. Other terms have been used to describe children who have some, but not all, of the clinical signs of FAS. Three such terms are FAE, ARDD and ARND. In the past, Fetal Alcohol Effects (FAE) was generally used to describe children who had prenatal alcohol exposure, but only manifested two of the three major components of FAS (i.e., growth retardation, typical facies and central nervous system impairment).
Because experts in the field were unable to agree on the case definition for FAE, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) coined two terms that separately described disabilities and central nervous system abnormalities associated with prenatal alcohol exposure: alcohol-related neurodevelopmental disabilities (ARND) and alcohol-related developmental disabilities (ARDD).
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