NIAAA: The effects of alcohol use during pregnancy on an unborn child are
well known. However, a recent NIAAA-funded study in rats has shown that a
mother’s alcohol use before conception also could have negative effects
on her child’s health and response to stress during adulthood. To study the effects of preconception alcohol use, the research
team, led by Dipak Sarkar, Ph.D., at Rutgers University, gave female
rats 4 weeks of access to a diet containing 6.7 percent alcohol, which
raised their blood alcohol levels similar to that of binge drinking in
humans.
