Please cite this paper as: SkogerbøÅ, Kesmodel U, Wimberley T, Støvring H, Bertrand J, Landrø N, Mortensen E. The effects of low to moderate alcohol consumption and binge drinking in early pregnancy on executive function in 5‐year‐old children. BJOG 2012;119:1201–1210. Objective  To examine the effects of low to moderate maternal alcohol consumption and binge drinking in early pregnancy on children’s executive functions at the age of 5 years. Design  Follow‐up study. Setting  Neuropsychological testing in four Danish cities 2003–2008. Population  A cohort of 1628 women and their children sampled from the Danish National Birth Cohort. Methods  Participants were sampled based on maternal alcohol drinking patterns during early pregnancy. When the children were 5 years old, the parent and teacher forms of the Behaviour Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF) were completed by the mothers and a preschool teacher. Parental education, maternal IQ, prenatal maternal smoking, the child’s age at testing, and the child’s gender were considered core confounding factors. The full model also included maternal binge drinking or low to moderate alcohol consumption, maternal age, parity, maternal marital status, family home environment, postnatal parental smoking, pre‐pregnancy maternal body mass index (BMI), and the health status of the child. Main outcome measures  The BRIEF parent and teacher forms. Results  Adjusted for all potential confounding factors, no statistically significant associations between maternal low to moderate average weekly consumption and BRIEF index scores were observed. In adjusted analyses, binge drinking in gestational week 9 or later was significantly associated with elevated Behavioural Regulation Index parent scores (OR 2.04, 95% CI 0.33–3.76), and with the risk of high scores on the Metacognitive Index assessed by the teacher (OR 2.06, 95% CI 1.01–4.23). Conclusions  This study did not observe significant effects of low to moderate alcohol consumption during pregnancy on executive functioning at the age of 5 years. Furthermore, only weak and no consistent associations between maternal binge drinking and executive functions were observed.

This study demonstrates that NSSI subgroups have distinct deficits in EFs. The high-severity NSSI group has working memory deficits, while the low-severity NSSI group has impaired inhibitory control. This supports the emotion regulation hypothesis.

Objective The aim was to examine the effects of low to moderate maternal alcohol consumption and binge drinking in early pregnancy on children's attention at 5 years of age.Design Prospective follow-up study.Setting Neuropsychological testing in four Danish cities 2003-2008. Population A cohort of 1628 women and their children sampled from the Danish National Birth Cohort.Methods Participants were sampled based on maternal alcohol consumption during pregnancy. At 5 years of age, the children were tested with the recently developed Test of Everyday Attention for Children at Five (TEACh-5). Parental education, maternal IQ, maternal smoking in pregnancy, the child's age at testing, gender, and tester were considered core confounding factors, whereas the full model also controlled the following potential confounding factors: maternal binge drinking or low to moderate alcohol consumption, age, body mass index (BMI), parity, home environment, postnatal smoking in the home, child's health status, and indicators for hearing and vision impairments.Main outcome measures TEACh-5 attention scores.Results There were no significant effects on test performance in children of mothers drinking up to 8 drinks per week compared with children of mothers who abstained, but there was a significant association between maternal consumption of 9 or more drinks per week and risk of a low overall attention score (OR 3.50,. No consistent or significant associations were observed between binge drinking and attention test scores. ConclusionsThe findings suggest an effect of maternal consumption of 9 or more drinks per week on attention functions in children, but the study detected no effects of lower levels of maternal consumption and no consistent effects of maternal binge drinking.

Psychiatric and cognitive changes are common in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), but their relationship has not received much attention. We studied the relationship between psychiatric symptoms and verbal memory, working memory, and mental speed in 78 patients with MS and 40 healthy control subjects using linear regression analyses. The MS group exhibited impaired performance on all cognitive tests. Apathy was associated with intrusions and depression with impaired memory and mental speed. The association between apathy and intrusions supports the hypothesis that lesions in frontal areas or frontal connections contribute to a specific neuropsychiatric syndrome in patients with MS.

The promising findings of codeine reduction in this weaning therapy programme for pain patients with problematic opioid use should be further evaluated in a larger randomized control trial comparing this brief CBT with both another brief treatment and attention placebo condition.