ABSTRACT
Aims
In current clinical practice, prenatal alcohol exposure is usually assessed by interviewing the pregnant woman. An alternative method for detecting alcohol use is to measure the biomarker carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT). However, few studies measure CDT during pregnancy. This study examines the utility of CDT biomarker in the screening of alcohol exposure during early pregnancy.
Methods
A cohort of 91, first-trimester pregnant women assigned to a public reference maternity hospital, was screened using the Green Page (GP) questionnaire, an environmental exposure tool. CDT levels and other biomarkers of alcohol use were measured and compared with questionnaire data.
Results
About 70% of the mothers in the study consumed alcohol during early pregnancy and 22% met high-risk criteria for prenatal exposure to alcohol. CDT measurement showed a statistically significant area under the receiver operating characteristic curve with a value of 0.70. For a value of 0.95% of CDT, a specificity of 93% was observed. The most significant predictors of CDT were the number of binge drinking episodes, women’s body mass index and European white race.

Conclusion
Pregnant women with a CDT value >0.95% would be good candidates for the performance of the GP questionnaire during early pregnancy in order to detect potential high-risk pregnancy due to alcohol exposure.

Mothers who use beauty products containing chemicals known as parabens during pregnancy may be more likely to have overweight daughters, a small study suggests.
Babies tended to be heavier at birth, and more likely to become overweight by age 8, when mothers used makeup, lotions and other common beauty products containing parabens while pregnant, the study found. One of these chemicals, butylparaben, was associated with excess weight only in girls.

Even so, it makes sense for pregnant women to check product labels and steer clear of beauty items containing parabens, said Luz Claudio, an environmental health researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York City who wasn’t involved in the study.

“The significance of this finding cannot be underestimated because girls and women typically used more personal care products and cosmetics containing parabens than do boys and men,” Claudio said. “Thus, this effect of early exposure to parabens in females could potentially continue to increase as they grow and use even more of these products, potentially affecting the next generation of girls.”

Read the full article at: Reuters, WebMD, Medscape 
Read the original research paper from Nature