And In Pediatric News

Not sure this news would have helped my kids’ mother twenty-odd years ago – but I’d have enjoyed it.

An economist looks at the studies linking alcohol and coffee to birth problems, and finds less there than meets most OB/GYNs’ eyes:

One big worry about drinking during pregnancy is that it will result in child behavior problems later. One of the best studies of this issue was published in 2010 in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. What makes it a reliable study? The sample group was large (3,000 women), and the researchers collected information about maternal drinking during pregnancy—not afterward. The study also followed the children of these women through the age of 14 and looked at behavior problems starting at age 2.

The other thing I liked about this study was that it was run in Australia, where recommendations on drinking during pregnancy are more lax than in the U.S. Because the rules are more permissive, Australian women who drink occasionally aren’t necessarily the kind of women who go against medical advice; it’s more likely that differences in drinking levels there are just random variation. Drinkers in the study were classified in five groups: no alcohol, occasional drinking (up to one drink a week), light drinking (2-6 drinks a week) and moderate drinking (7-10 drinks a week).

The researchers compared the mothers’ drinking level at 18 weeks of pregnancy with the children’s behavior issues at age 2. They found that 11% of the children whose mothers did not drink during pregnancy had behavior problems—versus 9% of the children of light drinkers and 11% of the children of moderate drinkers. (Nearly 14% of 2-year-olds whose mothers occasionally drank had behavior problems, but the difference is small and, statistically, could have occurred by chance.) The results were very similar for older kids.

There is much, much more.  Read it, and tell a pregnant friend…

…and even if you don’t have one of those, there’s a lot in there about how to read scientific studies.

5 thoughts on “And In Pediatric News

  1. The news media only publicize PC studies that support their pre-existing beliefs, as in “climate change.” They ignore studies that show the heritability of intelligence, violent behavior and so forth. Confirmation bias is the name of the game.

  2. As someone who is in a job that gets questions about alcohol and pregnancy, I would hope you would take the side of ultimate caution. Clearly heavy alcohol consumption causes damage – fetal alcohol syndrome is a reality. But lower amounts are not conclusive. I wouldn’t go by any one study on this because there are just too many variables. I always advise a woman in her first trimester to avoid it altogether. Later in the pregnancy, moderate amounts appear to be OK. After all Europeans consume wine with virtually every meal with few problems. Of course, you conservatives probably might correlate their political philosophy with something “in the water” anyway. The only sure thing involving pregnancy and alcohol is that abstaining fully will be the safest way.

  3. Dave,

    I don’t disagree, while noting that the Germans have associated beer (real German beer, not the chemically-addled swill Americans call “Beer”) with healthy pregnancy for decades on top of centuries.

    It’s academic for me. I’m done with the kid thing.

    And I do urge people not to take medical advice from my blog, much less any single study.

  4. BTW, Dave M?

    One of the most important things about this story isn’t so much “Yippee, pregnant women can start drinking!”.

    It’s “look beneath the headlines when it comes to “Studies”. The math and the headline frequently tell you very different things.

    My favorite example – the NEJM “study” that supposedly showed a firearm in the home is 43 times more likely to kill you or someone you know than a burglar. That was the headline, anyway – it was out of context, and digging into the data showed a very different conclusion.

    Anyway – that was the interesting part to me.

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