Sleepless nights if mum drank in pregnancy

IF YOU often sleep badly, doctors might tell you to look at your habits to try to find a cause.

But it may not be your fault at all – for research suggests that if your mother drank while she was pregnant it could wreak havoc with your sleep years later.

Exposure to alcohol in the womb may make it harder to slip into deep, restorative sleep as an adult, a study found. Just one binge during pregnancy could be enough to do the damage. And this can then cause a host of other problems, including memory issues.

US researchers studied adult mice that had been injected with a single dose of pure alcohol a week after birth. Differences in how mice and human brains develop mean this was equivalent to a woman drinking in the last three months of her pregnancy. The mice that had been exposed to alcohol got less slow-wave sleep, the journal Neuroscience reports.

This type of sleep is key to turning the day’s events into long-lasting memories and is also particularly restorative. The alcohol-exposed mice were also more likely to be hyperactive, and the less slow-wave sleep they got, the worse their memory.

The researchers, from New York University, believe the findings are relevant to humans too. As many as one in 100 people are thought to suffer from foetal alcohol spectrum disorder – a variety of problems caused by exposure to alcohol in the womb. These include learning difficulties, hyperactivity, clumsiness and short-term memory problems.

The scientists said some of these problems may arise when brain regions involved in regulating sleep fail to develop properly in the womb. Researcher Professor Donald Wilson said: ‘We have known for a long time that sleep fragmentation is associated with impaired cognitive function, attention and emotional regulation. Our study shows for the first time that binge alcohol exposure early in life results in long-lasting slow-wave sleep fragmentation, which, in turn, is associated with learning problems.’

Dame Sally Davies, England’s Chief Medical Officer, updated official advice last month to say no level of alcohol is safe to drink in pregnancy. Guidelines previously told mothersto-be to have no more than one to two units of alcohol – equivalent to one or two small glasses of wine – once or a twice a week.

‘Long-lasting sleep fragmentation’