Among the criteria of fetal alcohol effects (FAE), the most worrisome is neuropsychological deficit. Research on this problem requires prospective study with children followed for some years. The Cleveland study has followed a cohort of children born to women who responded positively to the Michigan Alcoholism Screening. Test (MAST) and to women who were matched controls. In addition to the MAST, alcohol-use data were collected in pregnancy and retrospectively. Information about current alcohol use was obtained at about 5 and 7 years postpartum. Neonates were examined for FAE anomalies and neonatal behavior assessments were made. Age-appropriate assessments of cognitive development, growth, and behavior were obtained. Important cofactor data, such as the quality of the caretaking environment, were also collected. Home visits minimized the amount and bias of attrition. Current data collection, including teacher ratings and achievement test results, is nearly complete. The analyses of data collected earlier has yielded a number of manuscripts.
The aims at present are: 1) to complete the analyses relating fetal alcohol exposure to remaining outcome measures (size, behavior measures, school performance), 2) to assess the possibility that paternal alcohol use at conception is related to offspring outcome (anomalies, cognitive measures, language, vigilance, size, behavior measures, and school achievement), 3) to organize the alcohol-use data collected 5 and 7 years postpartum to provide indices or factor scores to describe early childhood parental drinking, and 4) to relate these indices, in conjunction with fetal alcohol data and covariate data, to the child's cognitive, achievement and behavioral status in the late preschool and early school years. Statistical strategies have been developed to provide optimal multivariate models for analyzing the resulting complex set of data. Statistical diagnostics are being used to assess the contributions of unusual features of the dataset.
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