Focused and shifting attention in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure.

Attention deficits are a hallmark of the teratogenic effects of alcohol. However, characterization of these deficits remains inconclusive. Children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure and nonexposed controls were evaluated using a paradigm consisting of three conditions: visual focus, auditory focus, and auditory-visual shift of attention. For the focus conditions, participants responded manually to visual or auditory targets. For the shift condition, participants alternated responses between visual targets and auditory targets. For the visual focus condition, alcohol-exposed children had lower accuracy and slower reaction time for all intertarget intervals (ITIs), while on the auditory focus condition, alcohol-exposed children were less accurate but displayed slower reaction time only on the longest ITI. Finally, for the shift condition, the alcohol-exposed group was accurate but had slowed reaction times. These results indicate that children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure have pervasive deficits in visual focused attention and deficits in maintaining auditory attention over time. However, no deficits were noted in the ability to disengage and reengage attention when required to shift attention between visual and auditory stimuli, although reaction times to shift were slower.

Interaction of maternal smoking and other in-pregnancy exposures: analytic considerations.

The teratogenicity of cigarette smoke has been widely researched over the past two decades, in large part due to the work of Fried et al. The current study was designed to investigate some methodological issues surrounding the investigation of the effects of maternal smoking along with other potentially teratogenic agents in pregnancy. Specifically, maternal smoking was investigated both as a covariate and with regards to its main and interactive effects on child IQ in a prospectively ascertained sample of children whose mothers reported pregnancy exposures to four classes of agents: varicella virus infection (VC), selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) and benzodiazepines (BZDs). Children were also included whose mothers were not exposed to one of these four agents during pregnancy. The goal of this study was not to examine the behavioral teratogenic potential of these agents or of maternal smoking. Rather, our goal was to illustrate some methodological issues in addressing the combined effects of these agents in behavioral teratology. In the analyses of all four exposures, when smoking was considered as a covariate, it was either a significant or marginally significant covariate and the exposure of interest was not significantly related to a change in IQ score. However, when maternal smoking was considered as a factor in the analyses, four different patterns emerged illustrating the potential importance of properly addressing maternal smoking in the analysis of other potential behavioral teratogens.