[Prenatal alcohol exposure as an etiological factor in neuropsychiatric diseases of childhood, adolescence and adulthood]

Abstract

In Argentina, prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) is an almost neglected condition as an important etiological factor for the induction of a wide spectrum of neuropsychiatric diseases that may appear during childhood, adolescence or adulthood. Children born to alcoholic mothers may show a spectrum of diseases ranging from an apparent normality to a profound mental retardation, passing through epilepsy, attention deficit disorders with or without hyperactivity, autism and pervasive developmental disorders, and different types of learning disorders. When adolescents, they may develop different kinds of personality disorders and substance abuse disorders. Finally, in adulthood, they may suffer from different types of affective and psychotic disorders, among others. A great number of those children may not develop their full mental and social potentiality as free individuals. They usually have diverse types of cognitive, attentional, mnemonic and affective impairments. Not infrequently, they engage in antisocial behaviors, have school or work troubles. In this work, I review the present clinical classifications of the disorders emerging from a PAE and the several neuropsychiatric diseases that can be induced by them, in order to call attention to the Argentinian neuropsychiatric community about the increasingly, although underdiagnosed, frequency of these disorders in our country.