Pregnant women who binge drink early in their pregnancies increase the likelihood that their babies will be born with oral clefts, say researchers in a study published in the Sept. 15 issue of American Journal of Epidemiology.
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), conducted a population-based study in Norway, which has one of the highest rates of oral clefts in Europe. The investigators contacted the families of all infants with clefts born during the period from 1996 through 2001. They included 573 mothers in the study who had babies born with cleft lip with or without cleft palate (377) or cleft palate only (196), as well as 763 mothers they randomly selected from all those in Norway who had given birth to living infants.
The mothers completed a self-administered mailed questionnaire that focused heavily on the mother’s lifestyle and environmental exposures during her first three months of pregnancy, when a baby’s facial development takes place.
Researchers found that infants whose mothers reported having drunk an average of five or more drinks per occasion (binge drinking) during the first trimester were at an increased risk of having orofacial clefts than were infants whose mothers were nondrinkers. Risk was further increased among infants of women who had drunk at this level most frequently.
"The greater the blood alcohol concentration, the longer the fetus is exposed," said Lisa A. DeRoo, PhD, an epidemiologist at NIEHS and lead author on the study. "A single binge during a critical period of an infant’s development can be harmful."
The research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, NIEHS. Researchers at the University of Bergen, the University of Oslo and the Medical Birth Registry of Norway also contributed to this study.
