Women who drink alcohol during pregnancy may slow the development of their children's brains, affecting their ability to concentrate, scientists, including an Indian-origin researcher, have warned.
In the first study of its kind, Prapti Gautam, and colleagues from Children's Hospital Los Angeles found that children with foetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) showed weaker brain activation during specific cognitive tasks than their unaffected counterparts.
These novel findings suggest a possible neural mechanism for the persistent attention problems seen in individuals with FASD.
"Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to observe brain activity during mental tasks in children with FASD, but we are the first to utilise these techniques to look at brain activation over time," said Gautam.
FASD encompasses the broad spectrum of symptoms that are linked to in utero alcohol exposure, including cognitive impairment, deficits in intelligence and attention and central nervous system abnormalities.
These symptoms can lead to attention problems and higher societal and economic burdens common in individuals with FASD.
During the period of childhood and adolescence, brain function, working memory and attention performance all rapidly improve, suggesting that this is a crucial time for developing brain networks.
To study how prenatal alcohol exposure may alter this development, researchers observed a group of unaffected children and a group of children with FASD over two years.
They used fMRI to observe brain activation through mental tasks such as visuo-spatial attention - how we visually perceive the spatial relationships among objects in our environment - and working memory.
"We found that there were significant differences in development brain activation over time between the two groups, even though they did not differ in task performance," said Elizabeth Sowell, director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory at The Saban Research Institute and senior author on the study.
"While the healthy control group showed an increase in signal intensity over time, the children with FASD showed a decrease in brain activation during visuo-spatial attention, especially in the frontal, temporal and parietal brain regions," said Sowell.
These results demonstrate that prenatal alcohol exposure can change how brain signalling develops during childhood and adolescence, long after the damaging effects of alcohol exposure in utero, researchers said.
The study was published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.
