Comparative Teratogenicity of Alcohol and Other Drugs

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) conducted a national household survey of drug use in 1990, completing interviews with 9,259 people. Of all women surveyed, 78.7 percent reported they had drunk alcohol in their lifetime (NIDA 1991a). Sixty­one percent drank in the past year, and 44.1 percent drank in the past month. Women were generally light drinkers: 19 percent drank less often than once a month, and 20 percent drank monthly but less than once a week. In another national sample, of 5,221 re­ spondents, a proportion of women drank more heavily: 25 percent drank at least once a week and 6 percent consumed five or more drinks weekly (Hilton 1988). Among women ages 18 to 25 and 26 to 34, 84.7 percent and 89.8 percent reported lifetime alcohol use, respectively (table 1), and 53.3 percent and 55.2 percent reported alcohol use in the previous month, respectively. In general among women, compared with nondrinkers, drinkers were young, Caucasian, and unmarried. Drinkers also had a higher education and income, worked full time outside the home, and were Jewish or Catholic. With the excep­ tion of religion, these same characteristics also described the heavy drinkers, defined as women who consumed two or more drinks a day or who had five or more drinks on an occasion (Day et al. 1993). Drinking during pregnancy has de­ creased dramatically in recent years. Serdula and colleagues (1991) reported a decline from 32 percent to 20 percent in the overall rate of alcohol use during pregnancy over a 3­year period from 1985 to 1988. Nevertheless, in this random, population­based study of 38,224 women, 1,712 of whom were pregnant, 25 percent of the pregnant women reported that they