What Is FASD? About Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder

However, early treatment of some symptoms can lessen the severity and improve your child’s development. The more you drink while pregnant, the greater the risk to your unborn baby. Your baby’s brain, heart and blood vessels begin to develop in the early weeks of pregnancy, before you may know you’re pregnant. Drinking during pregnancy means the toxins pass to the foetus which can cause physical, mental or behavioural damage to the baby. Another concern is that a large proportion of pregnancies globally are unplanned29, which can result in unintentional exposure of the embryo to PAE in the earliest stages of pregnancy. Among children and adolescents with FASD, the mortality rate of siblings with and without FASD is 114 per 1,000, which is approximately sixfold higher than among age-matched controls273.

Signs of a Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder

Some require remedial education and others interact with the justice system. Early diagnosis and a strength-based management approach will optimize health outcomes. Find resources and tools to support provision of a medical home for children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders in your practice. Because of the wide-ranging presentation and large overlap with other genetic and environmental etiologies such as illicit drug and tobacco use, a primary care provider cannot make a definitive diagnosis of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. Once a primary care provider has a strong suspicion for fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, their patient should be referred to a team of specialists to rule out other possible conditions and make a definitive diagnosis. From animal models, we know that prenatal alcohol exposure affects all stages of brain development through a variety of mechanisms, the most significant of which result in cognitive, motor, and behavioral dysfunction.

Primary disabilities

• Prevention of fetal alcohol syndrome is the responsibility of all healthcare workers.
• The exact mechanism by which alcohol causes its teratogenic effects is not known.
• Medicine may help a child’s attention problems or hyperactive behaviors.
• A National Institutes of Health-funded study led by Michael Rivkin, MD, of Neurology, suggests that such exposures may have effects on brain structure that persist into adolescence.

Alcohol use in adolescence predicts subsequent use during pregnancy, and family physicians can play a role in identifying young women at risk293. Functional MRI can be used to elucidate brain growth trajectories and disruptions to neuronal pathways after PAE (including low-level PAE), thereby assisting our understanding of CNS dysfunction in FASD68. Advances in our understanding of the genetics of rare neurodevelopmental disorders may identify genes that govern susceptibility or resilience to PAE and provide additional insights into the pathogenesis of FASD187.

Social and behavioral issues

The beginning of fetal development is the most important for the whole body, but organs like the brain continue to develop throughout pregnancy. It’s impossible to exactly pinpoint all of the development during pregnancy, making it risky to drink alcohol at any time prior to birth. Fetal alcohol syndrome happens when a person drinks any alcohol during pregnancy, including wine, beer, hard ciders and “hard liquor”. One reason alcohol is dangerous during pregnancy is that it’s passed through your bloodstream to the fetus through the umbilical cord.

Improving the primary prevention of alcohol use in pregnancy and hence FASD is also warranted237,238. Alcohol consumption and binge drinking are increasing among women of childbearing age in many countries, particularly in the most populous countries such as China https://ecosoberhouse.com/ and India26. This rise reflects increased availability of alcohol, societal acceptance of drinking among women, shifting gender roles, increasing income of women, and targeted marketing of alcohol to women and predicts a future global increase in FASD prevalence.

Thus, PAE after major organogenesis may result in a FASD phenotype with neurodevelopmental disorder but without physical alterations, making diagnosis difficult80. Nutritional deficiency during pregnancy may potentiate the effects of PAE on developmental outcomes, and maternal alcohol intake may further reduce the availability of developmentally important nutrients87. FASD is caused by prenatal alcohol exposure, which is the leading fetal alcohol syndrome preventable cause of congenital conditions in the United States. There are currently five types of FASD, including FAS, diagnosed by prenatal alcohol exposure, craniofacial dysmorphology, growth impairment, and neurodevelopmental problems. The FDA has designated specific drugs for treating the symptoms of withdrawal from alcohol in babies. However, there is no treatment for lifelong birth defects and intellectual disability.

• Women who consume large amounts of alcohol often have iron deficiency, which increases the risk of FASD, and iron supplementation may be valuable297.
• Adolescents exposed prenatally to cocaine, alcohol, or cigarettes showed reductions in total brain volume and in gray matter in the brain’s cerebral cortex, important in many cognitive functions.
• Early intervention and a stable, nurturing home are important to protect children with fetal alcohol syndrome from some of the other issues they’re at risk of later in life.
• But since the alcohol is no longer available, the baby’s central nervous system becomes over stimulated, causing symptoms of withdrawal.
• Fetal alcohol syndrome is the most severe condition within a group of conditions called fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs).

‘Nobody asked me about alcohol when I was pregnant’

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