Currently, no effective treatments are available that can reverse the effects of fetal exposure to alcohol, which can cause fetal alcohol syndrome in children whose mothers drinking during pregnancy. But researchers Alessandro Ieraci and Daniel Herrera believe the results of their study with mice may offer hope for a treatment.
In their experiments, Ieraci and Herrera injected mouse pups shortly after birth with an amount of alcohol comparable to the amount of alcohol a fetus might be exposed to after a heavy drinking session by a pregnant woman.
The brains of mice develop later than human brains; the development shortly after birth in mice corresponds with the development of a human brain during the third trimester of pregnancy.
The injection of alcohol into the mice caused the death of brain cells and later behavioral abnormalities when the mice grew into adult mice. But when the researchers injected the mice with nicotinamide two hours after the alcohol, fewer brain cells died and the mice did not show behavioral abnormalities as adults.
The researchers also reported a weaker but noticeable protective effect against the cell death in the brain when nicotinamide was administered up to eight hours after alcohol exposure.
Preventing Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
"The results suggest that nicotinamide might be able to prevent some of the alcohol damage to the baby if the mother takes it soon after drinking alcohol," the authors said in a news release. "The emphasis in fetal alcohol syndrome prevention must obviously remain on helping pregnant women (and women who might become pregnant) to quit drinking alcohol."However, it is worth pursuing nicotinamide as a possible treatment for preventing fetal alcohol syndrome in situations where a pregnant woman is unable to stop drinking entirely."
Source: "Nicotinamide Protects against Ethanol-Induced Apoptotic Neurodegeneration in the Developing Mouse Brain" published in the April 2006 open access journal PLoS MEDICINE.
