There Is No Safe Amount Of Alcohol During Pregnancy
We know that alcohol is unhealthy for growing brains and can result in fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) – it’s estimated that two to five percent of children have significant cognitive deficits that are not associated with genetic heritage. The latest news on this comes from a study that analyzed brain signals in juveniles with FASD and revealed what goes wrong: altered connections consistent with reduced cognitive function. An international team of researchers looked at 19 teens with FASD and 21 kids without it. The investigators reported that the affected teens were more likely to have problems with neural connections linking the right and left halves of their brains. They noted that this type of problem has been seen in people with schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, autism, depression and abnormalities in sensation. Lin Gao, of China’s Xi’an Jiaotong University one of the international team of researchers, summed up the findings this way: “Our study…shows that there is no safe amount or safe stages during pregnancy for alcohol consumption.”
Source:
Lin Gao et al, “Quantitative assessment of cerebral connectivity deficiency and cognitive impairment in children with prenatal alcohol exposure.” Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, April 2, 2019; 29 (4): 041101 DOI: 10.1063/1.5089527
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