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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- While it's well known drinking alcohol during pregnancy can harm a developing child, new findings show certain parts of the brain may be more susceptible to damage than others.
Results of a new study show alcohol consumption during pregnancy can be particularly damaging to the brain's white matter -- nerve fibers through which information is exchanged between different areas of the central nervous system. Abnormalities in white matter in the frontal and occipital lobes can lead to the executive dysfunction and visual processing deficits often seen in children with gestational alcohol exposure.
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"Among other functions, the frontal lobes are important for planning and regulating behavior at an executive level," Susanna L. Fryer, a researcher at San Diego State University's Center for Behavioral Teratology, was quoted as saying. "Individuals with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) may exhibit problems with executive functioning, which can lead to difficulty inhibiting inappropriate or maladaptive responses, impaired attention regulation, and poor judgment and decision making abilities. The occipital lobes are important for processing visual information, and disrupted white matter coherence in these regions may relate to altered visual-spatial abilities in individuals with FASDs."
Researchers say previous studies have shown evidence of white matter abnormalities in the corpus callosum, which connects the two brain hemispheres; however, this was the first study to show abnormalities in the frontal and occipital lobes.
SOURCE: Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, March 2009
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