One in 10 expectant mothers aged 18 to 44 drink alcohol during their pregnancies, and many of them binge-drink, a study released on Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. Fully 18.6 percent of pregnant women between the ages of 35 and 44 said they’d had a drink in the previous month.
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“Any alcohol use during pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of birth defects and developmental disabilities“, she told Reuters.
When a pregnant woman drinks, alcohol travels through the placenta into a fetus, which doesn’t have the capacity to break it down. “It’s just not worth the risk”.
The authors of the report, who work in the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities and the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, wrote that there “is a need for a comprehensive approach to reduce alcohol use and binge drinking among pregnant women”.
Pregnant women’s binge drinking habits also raised concern among researchers, who said they found that pregnant women who drink reported more binge drinking episodes than non-pregnant women. However, this is likely due to changes such as the addition of cell phone surveys, rather than actual shifts in the prevalence of alcohol use.
One possible explanation is that women who binge-drink during pregnancy are more likely to have alcohol addiction issues, the study noted.
I’m the health reporter for The Columbian newspaper in Vancouver, Wash.
Alcohol consumption during pregnancy is risky for several fetal problems, such as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders and other adverse birth outcomes. “Community studies estimate that as many as 2 percent to 5 percent of first grade students in the United States might have an FASD, which include physical, behavioral, or learning impairments”.
Additionally, more than half of pregnancies in the US are unintended, meaning a woman might not know she’s pregnant when she’s drinking, Balachova said.
Older mothers and college graduates were more likely to report drinking.
That warning agrees with guidelines from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which cautions “no amount of alcohol consumption can be considered safe during pregnancy”.
The study was based on a survey of more than 200,000 women taken from 2011 to 2013, more than 8,000 of whom were pregnant at the time.
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Some of the women who drink while pregnant may have problems with alcohol that make it hard to give it up entirely and some, especially the binge drinkers, may be in denial about the potential risks.
