Alcohol and Pregnancy a Dangerous Cocktail

For years, doctors have warned of the dangers of heavy drinking during pregnancy.  But an occasional glass of wine?  Many expectant moms—and their doctors—assumed it was no big deal.  Everything in moderation, right?  Wrong.

A new study suggests that even moderate drinking during pregnancy can lead to both behavioral and learning problems that may not appear until the teen years.  And they may worsen as the child enters adulthood

“Ratting” Out Alcohol

The study, published in the journal “Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research,” found that both physiological and behavioral problems occurred in adult offspring of rats that consumed alcohol during pregnancy at a blood alcohol concentration less than half the level of legal intoxication in humans.  Granted, rats and human have a different brain structure.  But the biochemical processes responsible for brain function are quite similar, explains Daniel D. Savage, chairman of neurosciences at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and lead author of the study.

“It is reasonable to expect that biochemical deficits we see in the prenatal ethanol-exposed rats are likely to occur to some degree in ethanol-exposed human fetuses also,” he says.

In the study, researchers focused on the hippocampus, a region of the brain important for learning and memory but highly susceptible to prenatal alcohol exposure.  What they found was sobering: light-to-moderate drinking during pregnancy can cause long-lasting alteration in the brain and “damage you can’t see,” says Savage.

What’s more, it doesn’t take many drinks to reach potentially dangerous blood-alcohol levels. A 120-pound woman, for instance, could reach the lowest level that produced negative effects after consuming two drinks within 90 minutes.  This should prompt doctors to tell moms-to-be that “abstinence is the best course of action to protect the unborn child,” Savage concludes.