Someday, UNM Professor Derek Hamilton hopes to eliminate fetal alcohol syndrome.
Using lab rats for his research, Hamilton studies the effects of prenatal ethanol consumption because many children suffer with a moderate version of FAS that can go undetected for years.
“What you might see in a textbook about fetal alcohol syndrome, that’s full-blown FAS, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
There is a full spectrum of fetal alcohol syndrome disorders, defined by the Centers for Disease Control, as a group of conditions that result from a person’s mother drinking alcohol during pregnancy. FAS includes a mix of physical and neurological problems.
Full-blown FAS is easy to detect, Hamilton said, but moderate versions are less recognizable and equally devastating. In fact, .3-.7 percent of live births in the U.S. are afflicted by full-blown FAS, but anywhere from 5-20 percent have moderate FAS, he said.
“In many cases, with lesser-affected children, behavioral impairment may not show up until the child goes to school and gets challenged,” Hamilton said. “It’s potentially a much, much larger number of children than we think.”
Hamilton’s research is federally funded and done in a UNM lab. Pregnant rats consume ethanol during gestation, and Hamilton studies the behavior and brain function of their offspring. He said it’s harder to see the effects of FAS in rats exposed to lower amounts of ethanol.
“You wouldn’t be able to tell, looking at these rats, that they’d had heavy exposure to ethanol because they haven’t,” he said. “But when put in certain challenging situations, when the demands of the task are a bit more strenuous, then you can observe deficits.”
The rats consume regular drinking alcohol while Hamilton monitors their blood alcohol content. Hamilton said he is adamant about protecting his research animals.
“They just drink it,” he said. “You don’t have to coax them to drink it … They basically reach legal limits for intoxication, .08 BAC.”
Hamilton said he hopes his work will improve the lives of children with unrecognized FAS.
“How many of these kids are out there with behavioral problems?” he said. “How many people in jails are actually suffering from FAS, and we don’t know because they’re not easy to identify?”
FAS lasts a lifetime, according to the CDC. There is no cure for it, but research shows that early intervention treatment services can improve a child’s development.
There is no known amount of alcohol that is safe to drink while pregnant, and according to the CDC, there is also no safe time or type to consume during pregnancy.
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Hamilton said he would like to see the FAS epidemic disappear entirely.
“I remain optimistic that that can happen,” he said. “… My ultimate goal is to either directly or indirectly, through the influence of my work, lead to the development of treatments. Someone else, either now or later, might benefit from my work, and then it’s worth it.”
