Focus on: the use of animal models for the study of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders

Considerable efforts to educate women not to abuse alcohol during pregnancy have failed to reduce the incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome. Therefore, other approaches to limit the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure are under consideration, including the development of prevention programs and interventions. For these strategies to be as successful as possible, it also is important to improve methods for identifying affected children. The use of animal models in prenatal alcohol exposure research is critical because of the practical and ethical limitations of using human subjects for such studies. This article reviews the use of animal models in three areas of research: addressing basic questions about alcohol exposure during development; improving the identification of affected individuals; and developing approaches to reduce the impact of prenatal alcohol exposure. The various animal-model systems that have been used to study fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, each with their own specific strengths, have provided new findings that have been successfully extrapolated to human subjects, resulting in advancement of the research field and our understanding of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders.