March 13, 2023
How much alcohol a mother drinks before and during pregnancy could determine the shape of her child’s face, a new study has determined. According to researchers at Erasmus Medical Centre in The Netherlands, pregnant women who imbibe just one medium glass of wine (175ml) or one 12-ounce beer a week could change their child’s future appearance, reports Study Finds.
They add that the new findings are particularly illuminating, because a child’s face shape can be an indication of health and developmental problems. If a fetus is exposed to alcohol, the child may be left with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). This is a combination of developmental deficits, neurological impairment, and recognizably abnormal facial development.
FASD is already known to be consequence of a mother’s drinking habits during pregnancy, with a particular link to heavy drinking. However, until now, little was known about the effect of low alcohol consumption on children’s facial development and their future health.
“We found a statistically significant association between prenatal alcohol exposure and face shape in the nine-year-old children. The more alcohol the mothers drank, the more statistically significant changes there were. The most common traits were turned-up nose tip, shortened nose, turned-out chin and turned-in lower eyelid,” says study first author and PhD student Xianjing Liu, part of the group that developed the AI algorithm.
“Among the group of mothers who drank throughout pregnancy, we found that, even if mothers drank very little during pregnancy, less than 12g a week, the association between alcohol exposure and children’s facial shape could be observed. This is the first time an association has been shown at such low levels of alcohol consumption.”
“I would call the face a ‘health mirror’ as it reflects the overall health of a child. A child’s exposure to alcohol before birth can have significant adverse effects on its health development and, if a mother regularly drinks a large amount, this can result in fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, FASD, which is reflected in children’s faces,” adds Gennady Roshchupkin, assistant professor and leader of the Computational Population Biology group at the Erasmus Medical Centre.
The children were part of the Generation R Study in The Netherlands, an ongoing population-based study of pregnant women and their children from fetal life onwards. The babies were born between January 2006 and April 2009.
“The face is a complex shape and analyzing it is a challenging task. 3D imaging helps a lot, but requires more advanced algorithms to do this,” says Professor Roshchupkin. “For this task, we developed an AI-based algorithm, which takes high-resolution 3D images of the face and produce 200 unique measurements or ‘traits.’ We analyzed these to search for associations with prenatal alcohol exposure and we developed heat maps to display the particular facial features associated with the mothers’ alcohol consumption.”
The mothers filled out questionnaires in early, mid, and late pregnancy to find out how much alcohol they drank. Researchers then divided the women into three groups: mothers who didn’t drink before or during pregnancy; those who drank during the three months before becoming pregnant, but stopped when they became pregnant; and women who drank when they were pregnant.
This final group included those who only drank during the first trimester of pregnancy and those who continued to drink throughout the entire pregnancy. The nine-year-olds showed a significant link between the change in their face shape and their mothers’ history of drinking.
The children of those who drank during the first trimester but stopped and those who continued to drink were very similar, according to the findings. The results also show that the first three months of pregnancy were the most influential when it comes to the effects of alcohol consumption. The association between alcohol consumption and face shape weakened in the older children.
“It is possible that as a child ages and experiences other environmental factors, these changes may diminish or be obscured by normal growth patterns. But that does not mean that alcohol’s effect on the health will also disappear. Therefore, it is crucial to emphasize that there is no established safe level of alcohol
consumption during pregnancy and that it is advisable to cease drinking alcohol even before conception to ensure optimal health outcomes for both the mother and the developing fetus,” Professor Roshchupkin concludes.
The team notes that their study, published in the journal, Human Reproduction, cannot definitively prove that alcohol consumption causes the changes in face shape, only that there is an association with it.
Research contact: @StudyFinds
