Early identification of children who are affected by prenatal exposure to alcohol, i.e., who have Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), is essential to initiating early intervention. Early interventions can take advantage of neuroplasticity in young children and thus can improve outcomes for a child with FASD. However, current methods of testing young children for neurodevelopmental impairments are limited in their effectiveness and costly to administer. As a result, many children are not recognized as having FASD and years of appropriate and beneficial intervention or treatment are missed. Given the high prevalence of FASD in areas of the world where the disorder has been studied, earlier and more accurate recognition of children with FASD is of high public health importance. Building on the existing Collaborative Initiative on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (CIFASD) longitudinal cohort study in Ukraine, we will fill this critical gap by testing three novel, technology- based and scalable methods that can identify impairments in brain functioning in young children. These novel measures can lead to earlier, rapid, more accurate, and cost-efficient detection of neurodevelopmental disorders due to prenatal alcohol. Furthermore, the scalable methods being tested have global
Accurate and early identification of infants with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) is essential to initiating early intervention for those children. However, identifying infants and young children who are neurodevelopmentally impaired due to prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) remains challenging, especially in resource limited areas of the world. This study will bring together researchers in Ukraine and the United States to test three novel, technology-based and scalable methods of identifying impairments of prefrontal cortex (PFC) functioning in young children. This work can help improve our ability to identify children with neurodevelopmental disorders due to PAE as early as possible in life so they can obtain optimum benefit from early intervention.
