Transactions of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine
Prenatal exposure to binge drinking and cognitive and behavioral outcomes at age 7 years

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Abstract

Objective

The goal of this study was to examine differential effects of amount and pattern of prenatal alcohol exposure on child outcome.

Study design

Alcohol use was assessed at each prenatal visit, and IQ and behavior were measured at age 7 years.

Results

After control for confounders, the amount of exposure was unrelated to IQ score and behavior for >500 black 7-year-old children. However, children who were exposed to binge drinking were 1.7 times more likely to have IQ scores in the mentally retarded range and 2.5 times more likely to have clinically significant levels of delinquent behavior.

Conclusion

During prenatal care, clinicians should attend not only to amount but also to the pattern of alcohol intake, because of the elevated risk for cognitive deficits and long-term behavioral abnormality.

Section snippets

Subjects

All mothers in this study received prenatal care at Wayne State University clinics and participated in a larger institutional review board–approved pregnancy study. The pregnancy study enrolled 600+ women annually on the basis of a strategy to oversample alcohol-exposed pregnancies. The women who enrolled were interviewed at each prenatal visit, and the infants were evaluated neonatally. Urine was collected at visits and delivery as clinically indicated.

Children who were delivered from

Sample

Of the 665 eligible child-parent dyads, 94% of the families (626 families) agreed to participate; however, 40 of the families (6%) missed multiple appointments. These 40 families and those families with significant missing data (n = 30; 4%) were eliminated from further analysis. The remaining sample consisted of 556 families (84% retention rate). Although teacher compliance was high (>90%), this missing data reduced the sample for behavioral outcome analyses to 499. The children, all of whom were

Comment

Prenatal alcohol exposure was significantly related to both decreased IQ score and increased behavior problems in this large sample of black first grade students. Children who were exposed to binge drinking prenatally, regardless of the amount of overall pregnancy exposure, had significantly lower verbal IQ scores and significantly higher levels of teacher-reported delinquent behavior compared with the remaining children, even after control for other prenatal exposures and postnatal

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  • Cited by (0)

    Supported by National Institute of Drug Abuse R01 DA08524 (V.D-B.).

    Presented at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine, New Orleans, LA, February 2-7, 2004.

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