Published Reports On Pregnant Drinking Called Inaccurate

A national alcohol research group is concerned that the media's misinterpretation of a recent British research study could encourage pregnant women to be more at ease with temperate alcohol consumption.

Some media reports erroneously stated that the study by The University College London researchers revealed that light drinking by pregnant women could be beneficial to their babies. Other articles said light drinking during pregnancy would not affect the behavior or mental acuity of babies born to drinking mothers.

The Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders Study Group, a subgroup of the Research Society on Alcoholism, says the conclusion of the study was not reported accurately. "Unfortunately, several media outlets misinterpreted this report to mean that drinking improved the children's outcome," the FASD Study Group says.

The published report looked at the drinking patterns of pregnant mothers of three-year-olds and assessed the behavior and cognitive skills of the children. The University College London researchers actually reported that the children born to women who drank lightly during pregnancy were not at increased risk compared with children of mothers who did not drink during pregnancy.

However, this result may be based on the higher socioeconomic status of the light drinking mothers and their children involved in this study. Higher socioeconomic status is well known to improve an infant's neurodevelopmental outcome. The study's authors, Dr. Yvonne Kelly at University College London and colleagues, suggested this explanation for their findings and the FASD Study Group agrees with that conclusion.

Many published reports show that even moderate to light drinking can cause birth defects.

"Generally, the adverse effects of light drinking during pregnancy are subtle and may go undetected in children," says Feng Zhou, president of the FASD Study Group and a professor of anatomy, cell biology and neurobiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine. "Other alcohol research studies of moderate drinking during pregnancy have shown an adverse impact on multiple aspects of development through adolescence and young adulthood even when other important environmental factors are taken into account."

Zhou says the news reports have been carried in various European and American publications and on news web sites.

"The media reports are alarming for a number of reasons but it is particularly disturbing at this time of year when holiday parties may make alcohol consumption more accessible and appealing to pregnant women who have read the erroneous reports," he says.

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Craft Beer, Signature Cocktails and Organic Wine Top List of Restaurant Beverage Trends

New National Restaurant Association research shows that alcohol is among the hottest culinary trends in restaurants. A survey of more than 1,000 professional chefs -- American Culinary Federation members -- ranks craft beer, energy drink cocktails, martinis, mojitos, artisan liquors, organic wine and specialty beer in the top 20 trends. In addition to cocktails and bar drinks, alcohol is also used as an ingredient in cooking and as part of meals and menus through food-alcohol pairings.

"While wine, beer and spirits have always been part of the culinary arts and restaurant menus, specialty alcohol is increasingly popular right now," says Dawn Sweeney, president and CEO of the association. "As American diners are growing increasingly sophisticated, adult beverages can be an important part of both recipes and meals. Alcohol tasting menus, or flights, are served by more restaurants, and pairing beer and wine with complementary flavors on your plate can very much enhance the dining experience. Our new International Wine, Spirits & Beer Event next spring will highlight all of these trends and allow restaurateurs to explore new ways to please their guests' palates in both dining rooms and bar areas."

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Cigarette Smoke And Alcohol Damage Hearts Worse As Combo

Tobacco smoke-filled air is bad for cardiovascular health, and drinking alcohol at the same time only makes it worse, according to researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).

Testing the theory that moderate alcohol consumption provides some heart-protection benefits, the UAB team said it wanted to take the idea further and look at the effects of smoking and breathing second-hand smoke along with drinking.

They reported that mice exposed to smoky air in a laboratory enclosure and fed a liquid diet containing ethanol, the intoxicating ingredient in alcohol, had a 4.7-fold increase in artery lesions. That compares to mice who breathed filtered air and ate a normal solid diet.

Artery lesions are a common problem in heavy smokers and a key sign of advancing
cardiovascular disease. The results are published in the journal Free Radical Biology & Medicine.
The researchers reported mice solely exposed to the smoky air had a 2.3-fold increase in artery lesions when compared to mice who breathed filtered air. Mice solely fed a liquid diet containing ethanol had a 3.5-fold increase in artery lesions when compared to mice fed a normal diet.
The study points to a greater need to understand the negative biological impact of single or multiple risky behaviors, and the compounding effect of environmental hazards such as second-hand smoke, says Scott Ballinger, an associate professor in the UAB Department of Pathology and lead author on the study.

“Our study shows that exposure to cigarette smoke when combined with alcohol consumption caused the greatest degree of cardiovascular disease development compared to either action or exposure alone,” Ballinger says.

“Because moderate alcohol consumption is commonly thought to be cardioprotective, these findings are important for smokers and non-smokers alike in terms of what you should and should not do to protect their health,” says Shannon Bailey, an associate professor in the UAB Department of Environmental Health Sciences and a co-investigator on the study.

The mice experiments were performed over a five-week period. Blood-alcohol concentrations reached the equivalent of a 150-pound adult consuming 2 drinks per hour. Cigarette smoke exposure was similar to being in an automobile with a chain smoker with the windows closed.
In addition to measuring artery lesions in the study mice, the UAB team looked at other signs of advancing cardiovascular disease like DNA damage and oxidative stress in key heart tissues.

Like the artery lesions, these added measurements showed that taking in both smoky air and ethanol had the effect of basically nullifying any potential heart benefit from drinking alcohol by itself.

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State Medicaid Policies Impeding Access to Effective Drug for Alcohol Abuse

Many states could more effectively address the huge financial and societal burden of alcohol abuse by changing policies that may be inadvertently impeding access to an inexpensive prescription drug known to reduce problem drinking. These findings appear in a new study in the online version of the journal, Health Services Research.

The study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Georgetown University examined how state efforts to control spending on Medicaid, the program that provides health care for low-income individuals and families, may be limiting the ability of physicians to treat alcohol addiction with a widely studied generic drug called naltrexone. The research was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Substance Abuse Policy Research Program (SAPRP).

“States should be keen to quickly deal with this problem because today they are spending on average about $1 of every $7 of their revenues dealing with alcohol-related problems like child neglect and violent crime,” says Carolyn Heinrich, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the study’s lead author. “Naltrexone is certainly not a cure-all, but it can be a powerful therapy, it’s relatively inexpensive and states have the policy levers at hand to increase its availability to alcohol addicts.”

Evidence from clinical trials shows that naltrexone, which blocks a brain receptor associated with a craving for alcohol, makes it easier for alcoholics to stop drinking and stay sober even when the drug is used alone; that is, unaccompanied by counseling or other interventions.

“We know from extensive research that only about 6 percent of people diagnosed as alcohol dependent are getting medication during their treatment and about a third of those who do not get medication cite cost or insurance as the key barrier,” Heinrich says. “Revising certain state policies on prescription drugs is one way to address what is clearly a need for greater access to a clinically-proven and cost-effective treatment.”

Heinrich and her colleague Carolyn Hill, an assistant professor at Georgetown Public Policy Institute, found that treatment providers are more likely to prescribe naltrexone when states institute policies that encourage the use of generic drugs, include generics on their preferred drug lists and reduce drug costs for Medicaid beneficiaries. Conversely, they found naltrexone is less likely to be adopted in states whose policies allow managed care organizations to restrict access to pharmacy networks or limit prescriptions. Other policies that impede naltrexone’s use include restricting the use of Medicaid funds for substance abuse treatment and establishing restrictive Medicaid preferred drug lists.

State policies related to Medicaid prescription drug benefits are seen as critical to determining naltrexone’s availability because Medicaid funds and related block grants constitute the majority of spending, public or private, on substance abuse treatment. One reason for this dominant role is that most alcoholics tend to be poor and lacking in health insurance and thus are dependent on Medicaid for care.

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Bars, Not Liquor Stores, Associated With Heavy Drinking

Bars and nightclubs, but not liquor stores, are linked with excessive alcohol consumption and heavy episodic drinking in adults who live nearby, according to a new study from the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, California.

“Usually people think that liquor stores define a neighborhood’s alcohol consumption, but we didn’t find any relationship between them and problem drinking among the adult population in California,” says author Khoa Truong.

Instead, the investigators say that overall, their findings point to so-called “minor-restricted establishments” -- adults-only bars and nightclubs -- as having the most consistent and sizeable effects on adult problem drinking, even though they accounted for only about six percent of the total number of alcohol retail licenses in the area studied.

After accounting for one’s education level, income, race, and neighborhood sociodemographic characteristics, we found that a higher number of minor-restricted establishments located within one mile from someone’s home is associated with that person’s higher likelihood of binge drinking and consuming excess alcohol, the authors write.

“If the number of minor-restricted establishments increases, on average, from zero to two in a neighborhood, the prevalence of heavy episodic drinking in the past 30 days would increase from 11.1 percent to 14.3 percent among women and from 19.6 percent to 22.0 percent among men; and prevalence of riding with a driver who perhaps had too much to drink would increase from 2.9 percent to 4.1 percent among women and 4.0 percent to 5.5 percent among men,” says Truong.

The investigators were not surprised with the results, they write, because bars, taverns, and night clubs, especially those that do not allow minors, are where social and cultural norms are more likely to accept, if not encourage, excess drinking.

This research raises questions about the effectiveness of policies that target alcohol sales in general, such as a regulation in counties in California that limits the sale of alcohol licenses based on population numbers. For example, California imposes a moratorium on the issuance of alcohol retail licenses when the ratio exceeds one on-sale general license for each 2000 persons and one off-sale general license for each 2500 persons. Truong’s study indicates that limiting the total number of alcohol licenses is not as effective as targeting certain types of licenses, namely those for minor-restricted drinking establishments.

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Video: American Holiday, American Wine

Wine columnists Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher recommend some cabernet picks for Thanksgiving.

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Eat Fish -- Especially If You Drink High Levels of Alcohol

Essential fatty acids (EFAs) are just that; an "essential" part of the total fat intake necessary for a healthy human diet. Most EFAs come from plants, but some are animal-sourced. A new study has found that men who binge drink have substandard intake of n-3 fats, one of two types of EFAs, indicating poor dietary choices with negative long-term health consequences.

Results are published in the August issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

"Essential fatty acids are important building blocks of living cells, making up a substantial part of cell walls," explains Norman Salem, Jr., chief of the Laboratory of Membrane Biochemistry & Biophysics at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism "EFAs also have many biological functions, and a lack of them leads to loss of growth and development, infertility, and a host of physiological and biochemical abnormalities." Salem is also the study's corresponding author.

The most important EFAs are polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), said J. Thomas Brenna, professor of human nutrition and of chemistry & chemical biology at Cornell University. Particularly two types, Brenna noted: the omega-6 PUFA linoleic acid (LA), also called n-6 fats, and the omega-3 PUFA linolenic acid (ALA), also called n-3 fats. "Most Americans consume adequate amounts of LA in their diets through the use of vegetable oils, but tend to have low intakes of ALA," says Brenna.

This imbalance, adds Salem, has become pronounced only in the last century and many believe it is a source of the increase of many common diseases in Western society. Salem and his co-authors wanted to investigate what influence alcohol consumption might have on EFA imbalance in the Western diet.

Researchers used data from 4,168 adults who self-reported their alcohol consumption as part of the 2001-2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Participants were also interviewed about their EFA intake during a single previous 24-hour period.
Results indicate that EFA intake drops as alcohol consumption increases, particularly among men.

"Our most important finding is the decrease in n-3 EFA intake in binge-drinking men," says Salem. "We really couldn’t evaluate women who binge drink two or more times per week due to the low numbers in this population, although it is quite possible that we would obtain similar findings. The changes we found indicate that those who drink alcohol make food selections in such a way as to decrease foods with this important nutrient. The binge-drinking men have decreases in the longer chain n-3 fatty acids, the ones that we typically get from eating fish, and so this suggests that they eat less fish."




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Busting Beer Myths

It's the world's oldest and most popular alcoholic beverage. We see commercials for it on TV all the time.

It's beer. Some 35 billion gallons of the suds are sold annually -- producing total global revenues of $294.5 billion last year.

Do you know the whole story? Thanks to HowStuffWorks.com, here's your chance to bust your beer myths.

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Teen Risk-Taking May Be Biologically Driven and Inevitable, Research Says

While the government spends billions of dollars on educational and prevention programs to persuade teens not to do things like smoke, drink or do drugs, a Temple University psychologist suggests that competing systems within the brain make adolescents more susceptible to engaging in risky or dangerous behavior, and that educational interventions alone are unlikely to be effective.

Laurence Steinberg, distinguished university professor and the Laura H. Carnell professor of psychology at Temple, outlines his argument in, “Risk Taking in Adolescence: New Perspectives from Brain and Behavioral Science,” in the April issue of the journal, Current Directions in Psychological Science.

“While it is probably not fair to say that none of the programs we have developed works, most of the educational efforts to persuade kids to not smoke or to not use drugs or alcohol, to engage in safe sex or to drive more safely have not been effective,” says Steinberg, director of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice. “There is a program here or there that works, but, by and large, we have spent billions of dollars on initiatives that have not really had much of an impact.”



Steinberg says that over the past 10 years there has been a great deal of new research on adolescent brain development that he believes sheds light on why kids engage in risky and dangerous behavior, and why the educational programs or interventions that have been developed have not been especially effective.



According to Steinberg, heightened risk taking in adolescence is the result of competition between two very different brain systems, the socioemotional and cognitive-control networks, that are undergoing maturation during adolescence, but along very different timetables. During the adolescence, the socioemotional system becomes more assertive during puberty, while the cognitive-control system gains strength only gradually and over a longer period of time.
The socioemotional system, which processes social and emotional information, becomes very active during puberty allowing adolescents to become more easily aroused and experience more intense emotion, and to become more sensitive to social influence.



Conversely, says Steinberg, the cognitive-control system is the part of the brain that regulates behavior and makes the ultimate decisions, but is still maturing during adolescence and into a person’s mid-20s at least.



In the article, Steinberg says that the socioemotional network is not in a state of constantly high activation during adolescence. When the socioemotional network is not highly activated -- for example, when individuals are not emotionally excited or are alone -- the cognitive-control network is strong enough to impose regulatory control over impulsive and risky behavior, even in early adolescence.



In the presence of peers, however, or in situations where emotions run high, the socioemotional network becomes sufficiently activated to diminish the regulatory effectiveness of the cognitive-control network.


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