
Previous research has indicated a connection between drinking during pregnancy & rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, depression & even Parkinson's & stroke.
Neuroscientists said the latest study added to growing understanding about the risks posed to unborn babies by mothers' alcohol consumption, but added that it was difficult to establish a causal link between drinking & epilepsy.
Dan Savage, Regents' Professor at the University of New Mexico's Department of Neurosciences said: "This report builds on a growing body of evidence that maternal drinking during pregnancy may put a child at greater risk for an even wider variety of neurologic and behavioural health problems than we had appreciated before.
"The consensus recommendation of scientists & clinical investigators, along with public health officials around the world, is very clear a woman should abstain from drinking during pregnancy as part of an overall programme of good prenatal care that includes good nutrition, adequate exercise, sufficient rest, & proper prenatal health care."
Researchers examined the histories of 425 individuals from two FASD clinics, looking for a correlation between suspected risk factors including exposure to alcohol & drugs during pregnancy, & occurrences of epilepsy & seizures.
James Reynolds of the Centre for Neuroscience Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, who contributed to the study, said: "While this report supports a growing impression that fetal alcohol exposure may predispose the immature brain to the development of epilepsy, the results do not establish a direct cause-effect relationship between FASD & epilepsy.
"Establishing a direct link between these clinical conditions will be a difficult challenge given our incomplete understanding of how ethanol damages the developing brain & what neuropathological changes in brain tissue lead to the development of different types of epilepsy."
Around 456,000 people in Britain 've epilepsy. Fits happen when there is a sudden burst of excess electrical activity in the brain, causing a temporary disruption in the normal message passing between brain cells.
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