Prenatal Alcohol Exposure Affects Cognitive Performance in Children

Written by Joyce Smith, BS. Researchers, using chaos theory to analyze the biological changes in the brain that drive fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, found that teenagers who were exposed to alcohol while in the womb showed altered neural networks (brain connections) that were consistent with impaired cognitive performance.

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is responsible for 2%-5% of cognitive impairments in children ¹. Exposure can occur as early as during the first 4 weeks of pregnancy when women are unaware that they are pregnant ².While studies have been inconsistent, a meta-analysis did show that even mild, moderate drinking during pregnancy has detrimental repercussions to overall child neurodevelopment and when binge drinking occurs, the detrimental impact to the developing brain of the fetus is exacerbated ³.

Neurodevelopment is a term referring to the brain’s development of neurological pathways that influence performance and functioning. It includes academic achievement, attention, behavior, cognition, language development, memory, and motor development. Acting on the results of a recent study that demonstrated the precise mechanism whereby prenatal alcohol exposure affects the brains of children ^4,5, Gao et al hypothesized that even mild and moderate prenatal alcohol exposure could impair the neural connectivity within the cortex of the brain and cause cognitive impairment. To prove their hypothesis, they developed a sophisticated comprehensive data analysis called “Corticao Start Spatio-Temporal multidipole analysis that could identify the activated areas of the participants’ brains where neural connections were lost ⁶.

To explore a potential correlation between inter- hemispheric functional connectivity and cognitive performance, Gao et al tested for functional connectivity deficits within the brain cortex of 40 children. The observational cohort study ⁶ consisted of 19 participants with prenatal alcohol exposure (13 males, 6 females) and 21 healthy control teenagers (12 male, 9 female). The authors found significant differences in the strengths of neural connections in the brains of children with and without prenatal alcohol exposure. Children prenatally exposed to alcohol significantly lacked inter-hemispheric connectivity compared to children in the control group.

Inter-hemispheric connectivity is not only deficient in children with prenatal alcohol exposure, but has also been reported in schizophrenia ⁷ and multiple sclerosis ⁸ with sensory processing abnormalities, as well as autism ⁹ depression ¹⁰, and Alzheimer’s disease ¹¹. The deficiency disrupts cognitive performance and leads to potential neurobehavioral deficits.

The authors conclude that disruption in the neural connections within the brain cortexes observed in this study correlates with the cognitive deficits associated with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), and suggests a potential new biomarker for FASD. Based on their findings, they recommend that no amount of alcohol is safe during pregnancy.

The study is an observational cohort study which limits the possible causal inference that can be drawn from it; however, it provides evidence that both occasional and consistent prenatal drinking is detrimental to the developing fetus in that it can harm the neural connections in the brain, and lead to cognitive impairment in children who have been exposed to alcohol prenatally.

Source: Gao, Qian, Celso Grebogi, Ying-Cheng Lai, Julia Stephen, Tongsheng Zhang, Yuanli Li, Haipeng Ren et al. “Quantitative Assessment of Cerebral Connectivity Deficiency and Cognitive Impairment in Children with Prenatal Alcohol Exposure.” Chaos (2019).

Posted June 3, 2019.

Joyce Smith, BS, is a degreed laboratory technologist. She received her bachelor of arts with a major in Chemistry and a minor in Biology from  the University of Saskatchewan and her internship through the University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine and the Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She currently resides in Bloomingdale, IL.

References:

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