Study Says Light Drinking Not Harmful During Pregnancy; Two Drinks Per Week Does Not Affect Children's Development

Heavy alcohol consumption during pregnancy has long been advised against by doctors, but a new study says that light drinking during pregnancy is not harmful.

The study was published today in An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Researchers from University College London used information on 10,534 7-year-olds from home-visit interviews and questionnaires completed by parents and teachers, and also assessed data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a national study of infants born in the UK between 2000-2002. "Light" drinkers were identified as those having no more than two units of alcohol per week.

The findings showed that children born to "light" drinkers had fewer behavioral difficulties and higher cognitive test scores than those who didn't drink during pregnancy. However, these differences largely disappeared after statistical adjustments were made and show that light drinking versus abstaining during pregnancy did not make a difference in terms of overall development.

"There appears to be no increased risk of negative impacts of light drinking in pregnancy on behavioural or cognitive development in 7-year-old children," said Professor Yvonne Kelly, co-director, ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies (ICLS) at University College London, and co-author of the study.

The sample pool was made up of mothers who never drank (12.7%), those who drank except during pregnancy (57.1%), light drinkers during pregnancy (23.1%) and those who drank more during pregnancy (7.2%).

Kelly said that additional research needed to be done in determining the correlation between drinking during pregnancy and other outside factors.

"We need to understand more about how children's environments influence their behavioral and intellectual development," she wrote. "While we have followed these children for the first seven years of their lives, further research is needed to detect whether any adverse effects of low levels of alcohol consumption in pregnancy emerge later in childhood."

However, John Thorp, BJOG Deputy-Editor-in-Chief, advised women still concerned about their alcohol consumption levels to simply abstain during pregnancy.