Talk:Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder

Clarren

What is Dr. Clarren a doctor of, sociology? There is no presentation of the fact that some scientists believe that FAS is on par with phrenology and other pseudoscience.

There is no mention of the fact that genuine scientific study can not be conducted in the US because pregnant women are sanctioned from drinking in pseudo-legal manoeuvers that threaten their families, finances and freedom.

There is no mention of scientific studies which regard the fact that alcohol poisoning robs the body of oxygen, and the fact that foetal blood has a higher affinity for oxygen than maternal blood, and the fact that alcohol is metabolised relatively quickly in the body and that the placenta offers a blood barrier all suggesting that a foetus can not easily be affected by maternal alcohol consumption.

There is no mention of statistics about the frequency of 'identification incidents' relative to socio-economic status and race, which are strangely more correlative than with actual incidents of alcoholism. This is probably because there is no index for exposure to other home and workplace poisons in the FASD four digit diagnostic code. (posted by 195.137.78.175)

Hi 195.137.78.175, could you sign and date your posts please by typing four tildes after your post, like this ~~~~. Dr Sterling Clarren is one of the world's leading experts on FASD, based in the Fetal Alcohol and Drug Unit at the University of Washington in Seattle, which is the dept that first named the condition, along with a researcher in France. I believe he's a neurologist. If you can provide evidence of what you're saying, by all means do so, and if you're in doubt as to how to present it, post it here first, and someone will be glad to help out. SlimVirgin 01:54, Mar 19, 2005 (UTC)

More information on Sterling Clarren: he is the Robert A. Aldrich Professor of Pediatrics and former head of the Division of Congenital Defects at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Also currently the medical doctor for the University of Washington FAS Diagnostic and Prevention Network clinic and the director of Infant Inpatient Services for Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center. He received his BA from Yale University and his MD from the University of Minnesota. His post-graduate training was in pediatrics, followed by a fellowship training in neuroembryology, teratology, and dysmorphology. He certainly counts as a good source for Wikipedia. SlimVirgin 02:13, Mar 19, 2005 (UTC)

Hi Slim, Why does he do statistics backwards by guessing a percentile and extrapolating diagnoses? Why do the attached statistics vary a hundredfold? Where has he been published?

A good opposing viewpoint is found in the work of Canadian Dr. Donna Mergler, but I don't have access to medline anymore.

Also, newspapers have had of accounts since the 80's of alcoholic women that have been incarcerated until they come to term, had their other children taken away under broad interpretations of child abuse laws, and women have even been charged with distributing controlled substances to a minor.

Even hard science has it's biases due to what one can obtain grant money to study, but "there are lies, white lies, and statistics" [195.137.78.175]195.137.78.175 14:25, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)14:26, Mar 19, 2005

Normal drinking

Hey folks. The page mentions that normal drinking is safe - is this true? Most places recomend absolutly no drinking. Also, the word "normal" is a bit ambiguous ... If I always drink a fifth a day, does that make it normal, and thus safe? 128.104.102.148 21:29, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Expanding

I'm going to try expanding this article some more over the next few days/weeks. My apologies if it looks a little odd during the process, perhaps with points repeated in various sections. This is a feature of working on a little bit at a time. I'll try to tidy up as I go along. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 08:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

POV check

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder needs to be checked. I doubt that the article presents a neutral point of view: the statement that "small amounts of alcohol during pregnancy might not pose a risk to the fetus" has disappeared. the article also lists links like this [1] --Melaen 22:19, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Citation

Icarus, can you say what kind of paper this is, and whether this is a complete citation? "The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Alcohol and Your Unborn Baby. Washington, DC: American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 1987" Cheers, SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:38, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

The website that had the list of studies on the effects of light drinking is no longer around (though it exists in archive). I've selected one of the studies to use as the footnote for that section. Should others be included as well (so it doesn't look like it's one single rogue study that's never been duplicated, and is thus unreliable) or would that be overkill and/or unintentionally POV? Now that the site that was once linked to is down, it seems a shame for that compilation of sources to simply disappear if they can be preserved somehow. --Icarus 03:40, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

We'd need to know exactly what the source said. With something like this, it's best to cite a scholarly source. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:44, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

I've reverted because you don't know that the source said what you wrote: "Although some studies have shown that small amounts of alcohol during pregnancy might not pose a risk to the fetus, pregnant women are usually advised to abstain entirely as every fetus is different and there may be less visible (but still damaging) effects that these studies failed to pick up on." SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:47, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Correction: I was just browsing the "Further reading" section" and saw that while the link I knew of is now only available in archive, one of the links there is to a site with the same information. Maybe this external link can somehow be used instead of the one single citation. Would that be possible/stylistically appropriate? Here's the entire quote that had that particular source in the article I found it:

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists concludes that "there is no evidence that an occasional drink is harmful. Women who drink heavily throughout pregnancy may have smaller babies with physical and mental handicaps, but women who drink moderately may have babies with no more problems than those women who drink rarely or not at all."

There are several other sources cited in that article. I just chose one for the sake of having something to put down for a reference. If another one has a wording that's easier to work into the article, then it can be changed to that one. I do not understand, however, why you thought it had to be removed from the article entirely. I'll leave it that way for right now to avoid accidentally starting an edit war, but please explain why the non-wikipedia article and/or its sources don't count as a source for this article. (Or was it just a case of you reverting it before I finished posting this? The letters crossing in the mail, so to speak.) --Icarus 03:55, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, Icarus. If we're going to make medical or scientific points, we need to use the best sources to make them, and not websites about courses for nurses, because they may be worded loosely. If you can find such a source, by all means go ahead and add something, sticking closely to what the source says. This is a contentious point, so we need to get it right. Yes, I think we did have a bit of cross-posting there. :-) SlimVirgin ^(talk) 04:08, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Famous and successful people with FASD

Do we know any famous or successful people who have foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, whether they be full FAS, FAE or ARND? Remember, ARND is diagnosed at 4-5 times the rate of full FAS. What have they done and what are they famous for? Any writers, artists, scientists ... --Bronwyn Gannan 09:13, 9 May 2006 (UTC).