| No Drinking 'Safe' for Moms | |
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Dr. Virginia Delaney-Black, an associate professor of pediatrics at Wayne State says that even one drink per week by the mother can cause behavior problems the child, according to her findings.
We do not know what a safe level of alcohol intake is during pregnancy, if there is one, Dr. Delaney-Black told reporters. "We have to presume that the only safe level of alcohol intake during pregnancy is none."
Dr. Beena Sood, also an associate professor of pediatrics at Wayne State, was the lead author of the study, which involved 501 mothers and 501 children beginning in 1986. When the mothers were pregnant, they were asked about their alcohol consumption during each visit to the clinic.
Six years after the births, the mothers were asked to assess their child's behavior using the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist. The Checklist asks the parent to rate the child's behavior on a scale from 1 to 5. Behavior problems are sub-grouped into aggressive or delinquent behavior (externalizing behaviors) and internalizing behaviors such as anxiousness, depression, excessive complaining, or excessively withdrawn behavior.
The researched then categorized the mother's drinking during pregnancy as none, low, or moderate to heavy. The alcohol consumption was then compared to how the mother rated her child's behavior.
Deliquent Behavior
For the purpose of their study, the researchers termed "low" as less than 0.3 ounces of alcohol per day and "moderate-to-heavy" as only 0.3 ounces per day, averaged out over the pregnancy.After comparing how much the mothers drank to their survey responses the researchers concluded the odds of a child having behavioral problems if the mother drank while pregnant were 3.2-to-1.
"With increasing exposure to alcohol during pregnancy, the scores on the behavior measure were higher," Sood wrote. "And this was especially true for aggression and delinquent externalizing behavior."
The writers admit that their use of the "average" daily consumption for the study does not give them a complete view of the problem, since the mothers involved could abstain for a long period of time and then go on a short binge of drinking and still affect their unborn children, perhaps more so than having one drink a day.
No Known Safe Limit
But the study is another in a list that demonstrates that there is no known "safe" level of drinking while pregnant. What is known is that children are affected by the alcohol consumption of their mothers. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is the leading known cause of mental retardation but also causes life-long physical effects."From a scientific perspective, the link between moderate drinking and alcohol-related birth defects has not been clearly established," reports NIAAA Director Enoch Gordis, M.D. "Whether there is a threshold below which alcohol can be consumed without harming the fetus is not known."
"There is good news in recent evidence that the number of women who consume alcohol during pregnancy is declining," Gordis said. "However, it also appears that the rates of alcohol consumption among high-risk populations (pregnant smokers, unmarried women, women under the age of 25, and women with the least amount of education) remain virtually unchanged."
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