No safe amount of alcohol during pregnancy
Brain connectivity issues found in children who have experienced prenatal alcohol exposure
April 26, 2019
Science Daily/American Institute of Physics
An international group of researchers has taken one of the first major steps in finding the biological changes in the brain that drive fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). New work using chaos theory to analyze brain signals, discussed this month in the journal Chaos, from AIP Publishing, shows the long-term effects.
Researchers found that teenagers who were exposed to alcohol while in the womb showed altered brain connections that were consistent with impaired cognitive performance. Their findings were reached by measuring the responses from a brain imaging technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG) and then analyzing them with tools developed using chaos theory.
FASD is one of the leading causes of intellectual disability worldwide and is linked to a wide array of neurological issues, including ADHD. While the prevailing theory links expectant mothers' alcohol consumption to cognitive impairments for children, questions about the extent of this effect remain. Despite the known link, researchers are uncertain about the precise mechanism by which alcohol alters the developing brain.
The group's efforts mark one of the first times researchers have been able to quantify the effects of alcohol exposure on the developing brain.
"The paper provides important integrative results for the field of FASD," said Julia Stephen, an author on the paper. "These results may then indicate that simple sensory measures may provide sensitivity for brain deficits that affect the broader cognitive domain."
Previous attempts to study the brain circuitry in affected individuals have been hampered by the difficulty of drawing conclusions from complicated MEG data.
To get to the heart of the problem, members of the team developed a sophisticated computer technique called Cortical Start Spatio-Temporal multidipole analysis that could identify which areas of the brain were active when research subjects were in the MEG machine.
After data from 19 FASD patients and 21 subjects without FASD was collected, the computational approach revealed several areas of the brain that showed impaired connectivity among the FASD group.
Subjects who were exposed to alcohol in the womb were more likely to have issues with connections through their corpus callosum, the band of brain tissue that connects the left and right halves of the brain. Deficits in this area have been reported in people with schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, autism, depression and abnormalities in sensation.
"This work presents major evidence that children exposed to alcohol prenatally are at risk of suffering from impaired cognitive abilities and other secondary factors," said Lin Gao, an author on the paper. "Our study ... shows that there is no safe amount or safe stages during pregnancy for alcohol consumption."
The authors hope their work inspires other groups to conduct similarly collaborative research on diseases like FASD that benefit from drawing together medical and computational fields.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190426150639.htm
Children prenatally exposed to alcohol more likely to have academic difficulties
March 24, 2017
Science Daily/Research Society on Alcoholism
Despite greater awareness of the dangers of prenatal exposure to alcohol, the rates of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders remain alarmingly high. This study evaluated academic achievement among children known to be prenatally exposed to maternal heavy alcohol consumption as compared to their peers without such exposure, and explored the brain regions that may underlie academic performance.
Researchers assessed two groups of children, eight to 16 years of age: 67 children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure (44 boys, 23 girls) and 61 children who were not prenatally exposed to alcohol (33 boys, 28 girls). Scores on standardized tests of academic areas such as reading, spelling, and math were analyzed. In addition, a subsample of 42 children (29 boys, 13 girls) had brain imaging, which allowed the authors to examine the relations between the cortical structure (thickness and surface area) of their brains and academic performance.
The alcohol-exposed children performed significantly worse than their peers in all academic areas, with particular weaknesses found in math performance. Brain imaging revealed several brain surface area clusters linked to math and spelling performance. The children without prenatal alcohol exposure demonstrated the expected developmental pattern of better scores associated with smaller brain surface areas, which may be related to a typical developmental process known as pruning. However, alcohol-exposed children did not show this pattern, possibly due to atypical or delayed brain development, which has been observed in other research studies. These results support previous findings of lower academic performance among children prenatally exposed to alcohol compared to their peers, which appear to be associated with differences in brain development, and highlight the need for additional attention and support for these children.
Science Daily/SOURCE :https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170324192315.htm