Fas
Pre-pregnancy drinking: How drink size affects risk assessment
One of the leading causes of mental retardation in the United States is fetal alcohol syndrome or FAS. Alcohol is the most commonly abused substance by pregnant women because it's legal and socially acceptable. A greater majority of young women are not aware of the complications that are involved with pregnancy. They see pregnancy as a way of bringing a life into the world but do not use the necessary safety measure in their dietary habits to prevent such damage or inhibitions of such a life. By continuing on their drinking binge throughout their pregnancy, they can cause an inexplicable damage to herself and the fetus she is carrying. In my opinion, any amount of alcohol combined with pregnancy can cause devastating effects to the fetus.
"Neurobehavioral deficits have been found in infants whose mothers reported fewer than seven standard drinks a week, and the effects of drinking in early pregnancy (the first trimester) are among the more severe of alcohol's effects on the fetus, causing irreversible facial malformations and neurological damage" (Kaskutas & Graves, 2001). Lee Ann Kaskutas and Karen Graves believes that the precision of measurement of how much a woman drinks throughout pregnancy is very important to the assessment of fetal risk (2001). The title of their study, "Pre-pregnancy drinking: How drink size affects risk assessment", can help us conclude that the independent variables are the drink sizes and the dependent variable is the risk assessment.
From the introduction section, I have learned that in the United States, American Indians and African Americans are at the highest risk for FAS. Even though there have been advances in research methodology, people can have a misconception on the concept of what is a standard drink. When asked how much they drank on previous surveys, previous participants had a misconception on the drink sizes. "This has...
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