PREVALENCE OF ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION AMONG WOMEN POSES A SIGNIFICANT HEALTH RISK FOR THE UNBORN POPULATION

T he combined rate of FAS and FASD has been estimated to be as high as 1 in 100 births. Estimates of the economic burden of FAS and FASD in the U.S. have ranged anywhere from $75 million to $9.7 billion per year. Considering alcohol-related birth defects and disabilities are preventable and that FAS is a leading cause of mental retardation, it remains critically important to identify and follow the risk of prenatal alcohol exposure and characteristics associated with it in order to monitor and better focus efforts of education and prevention. The objective of the present study was to determine alcohol consumption patterns among women of childbearing age, including those who are pregnant or who might become pregnant. “Women who may become pregnant” were defined as women who were not using any type of birth control and who gave one of the following list of reasons: wanted a pregnancy, did not care whether pregnancy occurred, did not think they would become pregnant, feared the side effects of birth control, thought they were too old to become pregnant, could not pay for birth control, or had lapsed in use of a method. Excluded from this category were women who claimed they were not sexually active, had a same sex-partner, had undergone sterilization or hysterectomy, were postpartum breastfeeding, were currently pregnant, had other unspecified reasons for not using birth control, or did not provide any reason. A potential caveat with the exclusion criteria is that women who were postpartum breastfeeding, or who had either unspecified reasons or who did not provide any reason for not using birth control were not included as women who could become pregnant without explanation. Reasons for these particular exclusions should have been given, as it seems that these women could have easily become pregnant. The authors did however point out that the study was limited by the fact that only women who reported not using birth control were included as women who might become pregnant, thereby omitting any women who might have ineffectively used a method of birth control, or women whose method might have failed for other reasons. Data for women aged 18-44 (n = 64,181) were collected from the 2002 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey, which is a monthly, state-based, random-digitdialed telephone survey of non-institutionalized U.S. civilian population aged ≥18 years in all 50 states, District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories. The median state/area response rate for 2002, as reported by the current study, was 58.3 % (range 42.2%-82.6%). The participants were asked about their alcohol usage during the preceding month, specifically the number of days per week or month the respondents had at least one drink, the average number of drinks per drinking day, the number of occasions the respondents had five or more drinks, and the number of times they drove when they had “perhaps too much to drink. ” Drinking patterns assessed were defined as: any use (at least one drink on one occasion), binge drinking (five or more drinks on one occasion), and frequent drinking (seven or more drinks in a week or binge drinking). Binge drinking served as a subgroup of frequent drinking, and both binge and frequent drinking served as subgroups of any use. Although this is a common and unavoidable practice, the reader should be aware of this fact when interpreting results, and be careful not to add data from categories as they are not mutually exclusive. The article reports that approximately 10% of pregnant women used alcohol, and that roughly