Emotional Understanding in School-Aged Children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders: A Promising Target for Intervention

Abstract

Background Children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) are at high risk for secondary conditions, including mental health difficulties. Data on both children with typical development and other clinical conditions suggest that limited emotional understanding (EU) raises risk for psychopathology, but little is known about EU in FASD. Objective Determine if EU is a reasonable treatment target for children with FASD. Methods 56 children (6–13 years) with FASD completed the Kusche Affective Interview-Revised, a verbal interview measure of EU. Results Children showed striking delays in EU (2–5 years delay) relative to published normative data, despite mean IQ (IQ=94.56) within normal limits. Individual variability was considerable even after accounting for age and verbal IQ. Conclusions Despite variability in individual differences, treatments targeting EU may benefit children with FASD as components within a comprehensive, tailored intervention focused on child self-regulation and caregiver behavior management.

Sleep in Infants and Children with Prenatal Alcohol Exposure

“…This results in greater difficulty with complex tasks, particularly those that place higher demands on executive functioning (Kodituwakku, 2009; Mattson et al, 2011; Khoury et al, 2015). Children with FASD also show impairment in emotional processing (Greenbaum et al, 2009; Petrenko et al, 2017), and parents report significantly more behavioral and emotional problems compared to IQ-matched controls (Greenbaum et al, 2009; Mattson and Riley, 2000). As a result of these deficits, individuals with FASD experience increased rates of psychopathology, academic difficulties, trouble with the law, and substance use problems, negatively impacting their daily functioning and the well-being of their families and caregivers (Mattson et al, 2011; Streissguth et al, 1996; Fryer et al, 2007; Pei et al, 2011; Popova et al, 2011).…”

The Distribution of Available Prevention and Management Interventions for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (2007 to 2017): Implications for Collaborative Actions

“…Twelve community-based management interventions [99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109,110] aimed at managing the FASD were found. Two of the community-based management interventions studies discussed the use of a neurocognitive [104] and community translation [105] Math Interactive Learning Experience (MILE) program (Claire and Coles, Atlanta, Georgia, USA) to improve mathematics skills in children with FASD.…”

“…We also identified a 12-session, social-skills and play-therapy outpatient treatment for elementary school-aged children with FASD and their parents [100], emotional understanding intervention [101], an online training on FASD for Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) [106] and community home-based attachment intervention for caregivers of children with FASD [107]. These interventions improved knowledge of appropriate social skills, self-concept and parent-reported social skills in children with FASD [100], self-regulation in children with FASD and caregiver behavior [101], the CASA workers knowledge of FASD [106] and children’s ability to communicate their needs better [107].…”

The brain's functional connectome in young children with prenatal alcohol exposure

“…This level of stability is similar to a previous study in older typically-developing children (Vanderwal et al., 2017), which found correlations of functional connectivity matrices between the first and the second half of the data were approximately 0.60 when watching video clips. The high intra-participant stability in the PAE group was unexpected because children with PAE often have behavioral challenges, atypical neurocognitive responses to visual (Green et al., 2013; Paolozza et al., 2014), auditory (Stephen et al., 2012), and emotional stimuli (Petrenko et al., 2017), as well as altered functional connectivity among brain regions (Donald et al., 2016; Fan et al., 2017; Little et al., 2018; Long et al., 2018). It may be that movie viewing, as opposed to behavioral tasks, moderates the intra-individual variability in children with PAE and leads to higher stability.…”