Drinking a few alcoholic drinks per week during the first or second trimester of pregnancy can have harmful consequences on the cognitive development of the unborn child. Intelligence Quotient (IQ) is a measure of the child's potential to learn and survive in his or her environment. It predicts how successful we will be in school, work and life. It has been well known that heavy drinking during pregnancy can lead to lower intelligence in children, but similar data, about the effects of light-to-moderate drinking during pregnancy on the child's IQ, has been lacking. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine examined the data from 636 mother-child pairs who attended a prenatal clinic from 1983 to 1985. The women provided information on alcohol use during each trimester of pregnancy and their child's cognitive ability was assessed at age 10. A significant relation was found between alcohol exposure during the first and second trimesters and the composite score of the standard test for intelligence for 10-year-old African American children. Significant relations were also found for the verbal, abstract/visual, and quantitative subscales. Additional predictors of IQ at age 10 included mother's IQ, home environment, and child's report of depression. No such association was found for white children in the study. This racial difference could not be explained by the amount or pattern of drinking during pregnancy or socioeconomic factors. This suggests that genetics plays a role in these racial differences. Many women know about fetal alcohol syndrome and the potential dangers of prenatal alcohol exposure, particularly the damaging effects that heavy drinking can cause to a child's cognitive development. But this study found that even light-to-moderate drinking during pregnancy could affect IQ. It was also found that binge drinking was not the best predictor of future cognitive defects in children whose mothers drank at light-to-moderate levels during pregnancy. Rather, the overall amount of alcohol consumed during pregnancy was more likely to predict whether or not a child's cognitive development would be impaired. Since there is no safe level of alcohol exposure during pregnancy, it is safer to avoid drinking completely, during pregnancy.
Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research,
May 2006