by Amanda Ruggeri: Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240801-fetal-alcohol-syndrome-the-overlooked-risk-of-fathers-who-drink
A father’s alcohol consumption has long been overshadowed by the focus on what a mother drinks. But that could be about to change following new research.
For more than 50 years, scientists have warned about the risks of drinking alcohol in pregnancy. Recent research has found that a mother’s consumption of as little as one drink a week may affect a child’s brain development, cognitive function and behaviour, and facial shape, while for decades, public health campaigns have repeatedly said that there’s no safe amount of alcohol for mums to drink while pregnant.
The scientific consensus seems pretty clear – that prenatal alcohol exposure can cause a variety of problems (although some questions remain around the precise risk of light compared to heavy drinking, for example). Potential harms include neurodevelopmental impairments as well as particular facial features most commonly associated with foetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), but also behavioural, cognitive and learning problems, such as speech delays. The effects cover a broad spectrum, which is part of why FASD is now the preferred description to “foetal alcohol syndrome”, or FAS.
But as the risks of maternal alcohol consumption have become better-documented, another potential contributing factor to FASD has remained largely overlooked: how much the father drinks. Research on fertility and reproduction “has been so woman-focused, so maternal centric, that we’ve not really done our due diligence on the male side”, says Michael Golding, a developmental physiologist at Texas A&M University who researches alcohol exposure and foetal development.
Yet researchers like Golding have suspected a paternal role for a long time. “For years now, we’ve been hearing stories from women who said, ‘I never drank during pregnancy, but now I have an FAS kid – and my male partner was a chronic alcohol abuser’,” he says. But such stories often were dismissed as mothers being forgetful, if not outright lying.
Recent research, however, raises an intriguing – and possibly game-changing – possibility: these mothers were right all along.
