A University of Queensland-led study has found no strong link between drinking coffee during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental difficulties in children. The research, published in Psychological Medicine, used a novel Mendelian randomization approach to separate the effects of caffeine, alcohol, cigarettes, and diet on pregnancy outcomes. This study suggests that expectant mothers can continue following medical guidelines on caffeine consumption, but emphasizes the importance of overall healthy practices during pregnancy.
Scandinavian Coffee Drinking During Pregnancy
The study, led by Dr. Gunn-Helen Moen and Ph.D. Shannon D’Urso, a Ph. D. student from the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) also examined data on tens of thousands of families in Norway. Affagot said it was interesting that “Scandinavians are some of the biggest coffee consumers in the world, at least 4 cups a day with little stigma about drinking coffee during pregnancy”.
This allowed us to probe the possible consequences of population-based consumption patterns on coffee, meaning high levels, albeit widely accepted, of caffeine intake during pregnancy. To separate the effects of caffeine from other factors in neurodevelopment, researchers employed a novel method called Mendelian randomization to assess detailed genetic associations between maternal and fetal SNP variants.
Working through Environmental Factors by Genetics
Observational studies of alcohol consumption and the risk for common dementia are difficult to interpret definitively because an increased risk in association with higher alcohol exposure might be explained by confounding, given that these aspects often cluster together (i.e., heavy drinkers tend to smoke more than abstainers and have a dietary pattern with a high percentage of saturated fat 8 ). The Mendelian randomization analysis used by this study enabled the researchers “to untangle the effect of different factors occurring in pregnancy” so that they could establish a test for caffeine only.
It enables a randomized controlled trial without harm to pregnant mothers and their babies,” Dr. Moen added. This approach has the advantage of fostering a data separation between caffeine, alcohol, cigarettes, and diet so when we examine the outcome effects in pregnancy it is only concerning caffeine.
Pregnancy coffee consumption did not predict children’s neurodevelopmental problems.
For pregnant mothers, these results are good news and reassuring. They also reported “no association between maternal caffeine intake during pregnancy and any neurodevelopmental difficulties, including overall cognitive skill, language development, behavioral problems or the diagnosis of ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder.
It runs counter to the idea that caffeine builds up in the fetal brain and can only harm yet-to-be-born babies. Caffeine is not readily eliminated during pregnancy due to increased half-life and decreased metabolism[5] and can cross the placenta and enter direct fetal circulation, as there are no enzymes in the fetus to metabolize caffeine. An analysis of caffeine habits, however, found that the genetic-analysis approach used in this study was able to cleanly separate the effects of caffeine from other factors.
