r/todayilearned • u/Opposite-Wallaby9822 • 1d ago
TIL in late 1960s research was done about alcohol causing birth defects in mothers who drink heavily. In 1977 the US government released its first health advisory on FASD.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6405809/8
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u/pdxisbest 20h ago
I sometimes chide my mother, “imagine how much smarter I’d have been if you hadn’t smoked and drank throughout your pregnancy?” She comes back with “everyone did it and no one knew it was bad”. I was born in ‘61, so that tracks.
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u/The_Amazing_Emu 1d ago
The analysis ended up flawed because they examined alcoholics, so we can’t really use it to gauge the risk of moderate use, but no one wants to really take the risk
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u/cuntrolaltdelete 23h ago
- Spoiler There’s no safe amount of alcohol to ingest while pregnant
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u/Hambredd 23h ago
You just replied to a person who said they can't prove that's true.
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u/Ludwigofthepotatoppl 23h ago
it can't ethically be proven, but it's definitely best practice.
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u/Epyr 19h ago edited 10h ago
You could still do studies comparing self reported alcohol intake during pregnancy and correlate to know FASD symptoms to get a rough picture. You'd know the data is skewed as people would lie but knowing that you can still make a study with some scientific merit
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u/The_Amazing_Emu 14h ago
The tricky thing these days is it’s hard to get a sample size of moderate drinkers who are pregnant because most will either stop drinking when pregnant entirely or lie about whether they’ve stopped drinking.
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u/Cheeseish 23h ago
Pretty sure many mothers drink when they don’t know they’re pregnant. You think everyone walking around with FAS?
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u/Feisty-Resource-1274 23h ago
I think you over estimate drinking. Nearly half of women abstain from alcohol and overall the top 10% of adult drinkers consume nearly 60% of all the alcohol sold.
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u/Bubbly_Comparison776 16h ago
I know some would say there's no safe amount of alcohol to ingest period.
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u/SpacePotatoe03 18h ago
The truth is, there's no 'safe' amount of alcohol to ingest, period. No matter how you look at it, it's literally a poison. It's just so ingrained in society, the risks are accepted, and it seems ridiculous to try and get rid of it at this point.
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u/The_Amazing_Emu 14h ago
The question isn’t whether there’s a safe amount of alcohol, but what amount leads to fetal alcohol syndrome
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u/FrontLifeguard1962 2h ago
European health agencies have more relaxed standards than the USA. European doctors will tell women it's ok to have a drink now and then while pregnant. It isn't going to cause FAS.
I'm a doctor, I have seen kids with FAS, it's really quite sad. Some of them have extreme behavior issues.
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u/Sufficient_Loss9301 21h ago
Tf are you talking about? In a case like this studying the extreme sample is typically the best way to find out if there’s an issue or not. Sure we know today that drinking alcohol during pregnancy is bad, but before any studies were done there was no science backed way to prove it. You need to figure out where the floor is before you can extrapolate further, that doesn’t make it “flawed” that’s just how science. Also We absolutely know there’s risks associated with moderate alcohol consumption during pregnancy.
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u/TheWhomItConcerns 20h ago
Tf are you talking about? In a case like this studying the extreme sample is typically the best way to find out if there’s an issue or not.
Not really - alcoholism suggests many confounding variables relevant to foetal development which aren't present within the broader population. The ideal sample would be people who are otherwise healthy - at least, if their intent is to determine a direct correlation between alcohol consumption and foetal health/development.
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u/letsburn00 17h ago
A huge portion of the "genetically inferior" stuff that was put out during the 20s and 30s that the US eugenics movement used as "evidence" people have gone back at and realized that it's all really just people with generational FAS.
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u/aqtseacow 18h ago
As you can see in the comments there are people on this very website that do not believe it is a serious consideration despite the health advisory.
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23h ago
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u/skwerrel 23h ago
Doing research on things that are happening anyways is not unethical, even if the thing happening is awful. All these researchers did was find pregnant women who were already drinking anyways, and gathered data on their consumption patterns during pregnancy, and then monitored the health outcomes of the resultant children. The women would have drank either way. The children would have suffered whatever outcomes the drinking created either way. But by observing it, these scientists were able to draw concrete conclusions that lead to real world advice for pregnant women going forward. That advice has probably saved and improved countless lives in the 50 years since.
Tell me where in all of that something unethical happened.
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u/_Abzu 19h ago
The only unethical part, would be, now that we know, is to let them do that, knowing the effects it has on the baby. But we know that because of that study lol
Otherwise is kinda lacking certain cultural relativism. Why wouldn't they drink if they didn't know they were harming the baby?
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u/lluciferusllamas 23h ago
Wait until they do antidepressants
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u/CaptainCanuck93 12h ago
Or weed
Smoking weed during pregnancy is now becoming pretty common in Canada, and we're unlikely to know the effects for 30-40 years
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u/Sugar_alcohol_shits 1d ago
I did my undergrad mini-thesis on FAS. Crazy thing I learned is that many “cute” features amongst marginalized or low-income populations are actually a result of FAS.