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Topic Editor: Mary J. O'Connor, PhD, University of California at Los Angeles, USA
Prenatal exposure to alcohol, heavy, regular or even episodic (binge) drinking, has been associated with a variety of outcomes:
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facial malformation, including absent or indistinct groove in the upper lip, thinned upper lip, and shortened eye openings;
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damage to the nervous system, manifested as developmental delays and mental retardation and cognitive and/or behavioural problems;
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growth retardation (less than the 10th percentile for weight, height or head circumference at some time during pre- or postnatal development).
FASD is associated with the following cognitive and psychosocial outcomes:
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a distinctive pattern of intellectual deficits, particularly in arithmetic and certain aspects of attention, including planning, cognitive flexibility and the utilization of feedback to modify a previously learned response;
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deficient performance of alcohol-exposed children on tests of visual motor integration and visual memory;
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with respect to learning, the acquisition of new information is more likely to be impaired than retention and retrieval of previously learned information;
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as alcohol-exposed children grow older, deficits in socioemotional function become increasingly salient, particularly with regard to social judgment, interpersonal skills, a lack of consideration for the rights and feelings of others, and antisocial behaviour.
Accurate diagnosis of the full spectrum of disabilities caused by alcohol is essential for both primary prevention (preventing the birth of children damaged by alcohol) and secondary prevention (reducing secondary disabilities in children already damaged by prenatal alcohol exposure). The 4-Digit Code approach (a graded diagnostic, for all ages, coding the four main features: (1) growth deficiency, (2) facial malformation, (3) brain damage or dysfunction, and (4) prenatal alcohol exposure) is used to address issues of the reliability of diagnosis through the development of quantifiable scales. Still, the most challenging problem in the field of FASD is identifying children who do not display facial malformations.
See also...
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