New research suggests that indulging in even minute amounts of alcohol during pregnancy could result in serious damage to the fetus. The study says that prenatal exposure to alcohol affects the cognitive reaction times in infancy in an adverse manner and subsequently results in attention disorders in later life.
The findings of the study are published in the August issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. Researchers at the Wayne State University assessed the impact of prenatal alcohol in 337 African-American children whose mothers had a known history of drinking during pregnancy. Out of these 337, 197 were males and 140 were females. These children were chosen from the Detroit Prenatal Alcohol Longitudinal Cohort and were assessed for their processing speed and efficiency as regards short-term memory scanning, mental rotation, number comparison, and arrow-discrimination processing.
The children, aged 7.5 years were marked by using the Sternberg paradigm, a method that examines the speed of completion as the tasks ascend in their difficulty. "We used the Sternberg paradigm because it indicates how fast an individual generates the correct response to a number of problems, providing an overall measure of speed; and it examines the rate at which response times increase as problem difficulty increases, providing a processing efficiency measure," said Matthew J. Burden, postdoctoral research fellow at Wayne State University School of Medicine and the lead author of the study.
The researchers found that alcohol exposed children were able to keep up with their unexposed counterparts in the initial stages when the problems were relatively simple. However, when presented with problems that required a quick response, it was found that their speed slowed down considerably. “Prenatal alcohol exposure had some impact on both speed and working memory, but the effect on working memory was partly accounted for by the deficits in speed – in other words, slower performance contributes in part to poorer working memory," said Burden.
Julie Croxford, graduate research assistant at Wayne State University said that their study was a pointer towards the facts that were touched by previous studies as well. These studies had also found that alcohol in pregnancy was responsible for a lot of permanent deficits in later life, "This reinforces the current public health message that women should not drink alcohol during pregnancy," she concluded.
