Drinking During Pregnancy Could Have Seriously Long-Term Consequences
When your best friend says she's "just not in the mood" for a glass of wine, you can't help but be suspicious. Maybe it's true, but maybe, just maybe, she's pregnant. Drinking while expecting has long been a controversial issue, one that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) most recently put its foot down on, stating that prenatal exposure to alcohol can damage the developing fetus.
Now, a new study from Binghamton University says there may be another reason for moms-to-be to cut out booze.
The research team is the first to look into the effects of drinking during pregnancy on alcohol-related behavior on future generations. In the study, pregnant rats received the rat equivalent amount of one human-size glass of wine, four days in a row, at gestational days 17–20 (the equivalent of the second trimester in humans).
The researchers then looked at whether juvenile male and female offspring preferred water or alcohol. They also tested how sensitive adolescent males were to alcohol by injecting them with a high-alcohol dose, which made them unresponsive (falling over on their back, clearly drunk) and measuring the time it took them to recover their senses (back on their four paws).
"Our findings show that in the rat, when a mother consumes the equivalent of one glass of wine four times during the pregnancy, her offspring and grand-offspring, up to the third generation, show increased alcohol preference and less sensitivity to alcohol," lead researcher Nicole Cameron, assistant professor of psychology at Binghamton University, writes in the study. "Thus, the offspring are more likely to develop alcoholism."
One in 10 pregnant women say they drink, and a third of those women actually binge-drink, according to a recent survey from the CDC.
But it's worth noting that research on imbibing while expecting is mixed. Research from 2012 out of Denmark suggested that light to moderate drinking early in pregnancy - up to eight drinks a week - has no effect on intelligence, attention, or self-control in children at age 5.
Emily Oster, author of the 2013 book Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong and What You Really Need to Know, talked to various doctors and looked into all the conflicting evidence, and concluded that a random glass of wine on a weekly basis probably isn't harmful.
So the jury's still out on whether passing on the pinot until you give birth will eventually affect your baby - or your child's baby. In the meantime, the Binghamton Universityresearchers plan to look further into their findings to see if alcohol during pregnancy affects the baby genetically.
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