Mattson S N, Riley E P
Center for Behavioral Teratology, San Diego State University, CA, USA.
J Int Neuropsychol Soc. 1999 Jul;5(5):462-71. doi: 10.1017/s1355617799555082.
Prenatal alcohol exposure is associated with widespread and devastating neurodevelopmental deficits. Numerous reports have suggested memory deficits in both humans and animals exposed prenatally to alcohol. However, the nature of these memory deficits remains to be characterized. Recently children with fetal alcohol syndrome were shown to have learning and memory deficits on a verbal learning and memory measure that involved free recall and recognition memory. The current study seeks to further characterize memory functioning in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure by evaluating priming performance. The choice of task is also relevant given previous studies of memory performance in patient groups with and without involvement of the basal ganglia, a group of structures known to be affected in fetal alcohol syndrome. Three groups were evaluated for lexical priming, free recall, recognition memory, and verbal fluency: (1) children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure; (2) children with Down syndrome; and (3) nonexposed controls. The children with Down syndrome showed significantly less priming than alcohol-exposed children, who did not differ from controls. In addition, the alcohol-exposed children were impaired on the free recall task but not on the recognition memory task, whereas the children with Down syndrome performed significantly worse than the alcohol-exposed group on both tasks. Finally, on the verbal fluency task, children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure were impaired on both category and letter fluency, but the degree of impairment was greater for letter fluency. These results further characterize the memory deficits in children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure suggesting that in spite of learning and memory deficits, they are able to benefit from priming of verbal information.
产前酒精暴露与广泛且具有毁灭性的神经发育缺陷有关。众多报告表明，产前暴露于酒精的人类和动物均存在记忆缺陷。然而，这些记忆缺陷的本质仍有待明确。最近有研究表明，患有胎儿酒精综合征的儿童在一项涉及自由回忆和识别记忆的言语学习和记忆测试中存在学习和记忆缺陷。本研究旨在通过评估启动效应表现，进一步明确产前大量酒精暴露儿童的记忆功能。鉴于先前对有或无基底神经节参与的患者组记忆表现的研究，任务的选择也具有相关性，基底神经节是已知在胎儿酒精综合征中会受影响的一组结构。对三组儿童进行了词汇启动效应、自由回忆、识别记忆和言语流畅性评估：（1）产前大量酒精暴露儿童；（2）唐氏综合征儿童；（3）未暴露对照组。唐氏综合征儿童的启动效应明显低于酒精暴露儿童，而酒精暴露儿童与对照组无差异。此外，酒精暴露儿童在自由回忆任务中表现受损，但在识别记忆任务中未受损，而唐氏综合征儿童在这两项任务中的表现均明显比酒精暴露组差。最后，在言语流畅性任务中，产前大量酒精暴露儿童在类别流畅性和字母流畅性方面均受损，但字母流畅性的受损程度更大。这些结果进一步明确了产前大量酒精暴露儿童的记忆缺陷，表明尽管存在学习和记忆缺陷，但他们能够从言语信息的启动效应中获益。
