Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorders More Common Than Believed

More children than previously thought may have some type of disability caused by maternal drinking during pregnancy, according to a new study published in JAMA. Researchers suggest that 1.5 to 5 percent of U.S. children — up to five times previous estimates — have a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. To put things in perspective, that's as common as autism, which impacts roughly 1.5 percent.

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (also called FASDs) can range from moderate to severe and include cognitive, behavioral and physical difficulties, according to the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention: 

• Abnormal facial features, such as a smooth ridge between the nose and upper lip 
• Small head size
• Shorter-than-average height
• Low body weight
• Poor coordination
• Hyperactive behavior
• Difficulty with attention
• Poor memory
• Learning disabilities
• Speech and language delays
• Intellectual disability or low IQ
• Poor reasoning and judgment skills
• Sleep and sucking problems as a baby
• Vision or hearing problems
• Problems with the heart, kidneys, or bones

The study, funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, evaluated nearly 3,000 students as well as some of their mothers. More than a third of the children’s moms declined to answer questions about drinking during pregnancy.

“When you identify a kid with FASD, you’ve just identified a mom who drank during pregnancy and harmed her child,” Susan Astley, director of the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Diagnostic and Prevention Network at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study, told The New York Times.

Health authorities in the United States have pretty clear warnings when it comes to drinking during pregnancy: don’t do it. A 2015 American Academy of Pediatrics report said “no amount of alcohol intake should be considered safe” during any trimester. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, advised sexually active women who are not using birth control to “not drink alcohol at all.”

Even a small amount of alcohol can seriously affect a baby, said Dr. Astley. “There’s probably no two women on the planet who drank the same amount on the same day of pregnancy. And alcohol doesn’t impact every fetus in the same way.”

The researchers hope that these findings will serve as a wake-up call for moms-to-be: “Alcohol can damage every system of the body,” Dr. Svetlana Popova, a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s Institute for Mental Health Policy Research in Toronto and a co-author of an editorial about the new study, told NYT. “We have to scream about this problem to the world.”

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