Even small amount of alcohol during pregnancy may impair foetal cognitive ability

DELHI: There is no safe amount or safe stages during pregnancy for alcohol consumption, according to a recent study. This study backs and validates the most common advice given to women during their pregnancy that "Do not drink alcohol during pregnancy!”

The study, published in the journal Chaos found that exposing babies to alcohol while in the mother's womb can lead to both deficiencies in cortical inter-hemispheric connectivity and cognitive impairment. This can occur from both occasional and consistent drinking. 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.

Children exposed to alcohol prenatally are at risk of developing a Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) characterized by cerebral connectivity deficiency and impaired cognitive abilities. FASD is one of the leading causes of intellectual disability worldwide and is linked to a wide array of neurological issues, including ADHD. In this study, the researchers have taken one of the first major steps in finding the biological changes in the brain that drive FASD.

Credit: Gao Lin and Linda Sommerlade. Schematic representation of the presented results in the paper.

Alcohol consumption during pregnancy is known to cause cognitive impairment in children. However, recent studies have indicated that the risk of drinking during pregnancy may have been exaggerated. In this context, it becomes important to determine and up to which amount the consumption of alcohol will affect the cognitive development of children.

Also Read: Light drinking upto two glasses of wine a week during pregnancy not harmful : BMJ

Lin Gao, State Key Laboratory of Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Shaanxi, China, and colleagues evaluated time-varying functional connectivity using magnetoencephalogram data from somatosensory evoked response experiments for 19 teenage subjects with prenatal alcohol exposure and 21 healthy control teenage subjects using a new time-varying connectivity approach, combining renormalised partial directed coherence with state space modeling.

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.

Also Read: Exposure of infants to alcohol through breast milk lowers their cognition

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.

"We show that the disruption in the inter-hemispheric connectivity observed in this study is correlated with cognitive deficits associated with FASD, suggesting a potential new biomarker for FASD. Based on our findings, we support the recommendation of no safe amount of alcohol during pregnancy," concluded the authors.

For detailed research article log on to https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5089527