BACKGROUND Health care providers can more effectively prevent fetal alcohol syndrome and prenatal alcohol exposure if they know more about mothers who have children with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) or some characteristics of FAS. METHODS We conducted two retrospective case-control studies of Northern Plains Indian children with FAS and some characteristics of FAS diagnosed from 1981 to 1993 ...

Fetal alcohol syndrome and its wider spectrum of presentation fetal alcohol spectrum disorders represent a range of disorders that are sometimes difficult to recognise as they may present in a way that overlaps with other conditions. This makes identification and recognition challenging, which increases the burden associated with the disorder. When considering the reduction in morbidity, both p...

Reference values of facial features in white Scandinavian children were ascertained using a newly developed range-camera technique with a three-dimensional measuring program specifically designed for anthropometric measurements. Seven facial features in 613 healthy subjects (322 girls, 291 boys), aged 1 month to 18 years, and nine subjects with the fetal alcohol syndrome,aged 7 to 18 years, wer...

Dr. Larry Burd is the Director, North Dakota Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Center and an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine. He has worked in the fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) field since the mid-1980s and has published extensively in this area, most recently on the use of community screening for detecting FAS. He is also part of the...

TO THE EDITOR: A causal connection between alcoholic mothers and developmental delays and physical abnormalities in their babies was identified in the 1970s and termed fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). Other less extreme but still disabling effects fall under the umbrella term of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). Some studies have found higher prevalences of FAS among indigenous children in s...

One of the ongoing challenges for the accurate diagnosis and treatment of children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) is the difficulty of confirming whether a mother drank during her pregnancy. Commonly used screening questionnaires often are unreliable, and current established biomarkers of alcohol consumption are not sensitive enough for use with many pregnant women. These limitati...

Health disparities in fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) are of high importance to American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities. We conducted focus groups and interviews with 21 AI/AN women and key informants in Southern California to modify a brief, Web-based program for screening and prevention of prenatal alcohol use. This process resulted in several important program modifications...