A group of researchers has decided to pursue the research in finding how exactly alcohol affects the brain of the child in the womb, and it’s transformation into Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder or FASD. They are using technology based on the Chaos Theory to analyze signals in the brains affected by FASD.
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What is FASD and how they saw the changes
The technique used is called Magnetoencephalograpy, or MEG, which is a brain imaging method. The scientists then use tools developed by Chaos Theory to analyze the images.
FASD is a condition in unborn children due to an excessive amount of aforementioned substance in the mother’s bloodstream. It results in intellectual disability and can also cause several mental disorders like Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder.
Doctors know that alcohol consumption is considered the primary cause. However, the definition of ‘safe’ amount during pregnancy is still uncertain. Additionally, it is also unclear how alcohol changes neural pathways enough to cause these problems.
What does Alcohol Consumption Do?
Researchers found out that people who suffered from FASD had issues with their corpus callosum. For the uninitiated, it’s the mass of grey matter that connects the left and right halves of the brain. They used “Cortical Start Spatio-Temporal multi-dipole analysis” to come to this conclusion.
Lin Gao, an author of the paper said,
This work presents major evidence that children exposed to alcohol prenatally are at risk of suffering from impaired cognitive abilities and other secondary factors. Our study … shows that there is no safe amount or safe stages during pregnancy for alcohol consumption.”