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Query: UMLS:C0917816 (mental retardation)
 15,867 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Intellectual deterioration, changing in behavior and affect are often seen in association with long continued and heavy alcohol ingestion and such deteriorated states of patients are called alcoholic dementia. A large number of investigators have attempted to designate clinical concept of alcoholic dementia throughout the centuries and many kinds of term like as alcoholic pseudo-paralysis, alcoholic mental deficiency and alcoholic deterioration, etc, have been submitted since the beginning of 19th century. Numerous psychometric studies have indicated cognitive impairment and memory disturbance in chronic alcohol abusers and moreover brain PEG and CT-scan studies have shown sulcal widening and enlarged ventricles to be common in alcoholics. However, alcoholic dementia is hard to classify as a distinct disorder caused by alcoholic ingestion. The reason is lack of specific findings, both clinical and histopathological, like as Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome and other nutritional disorders in alcoholics. Victor, M. describes in his work the majority of patients who have come to autopsy with the clinical diagnosis of primary alcoholic dementia have shown the lesions of the Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome and he postulates alcoholic dementia is heavily contaminated with burned-out Wernicke-Korsakoff disease. The clinical and pathological observations presented by this time represent alcoholic dementia is a residual category for cases in which there are severe impairment of intelligence with marked deterioration of personality following prolonged and heavy drinking.
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PMID:[Clinical concept of alcoholic dementia]. 189 48

As part of the Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Questionnaire administered in the 1985 National Health Interview Survey, nearly 20,000 respondents ages 18-44 answered questions about their awareness of the risks of smoking and heavy drinking during pregnancy. In reference to smoking, interviewers asked about miscarriage, stillbirth, prematurity, and low birth weight; in reference to heavy drinking, they asked about miscarriage, mental retardation, low birth weight, and birth defects, as well as fetal alcohol syndrome. For each of these adverse outcomes, a majority of subjects acknowledged increased risk because of smoking or heavy drinking during pregnancy. The range was 66-80 percent of respondents for the four questions on smoking, with the perceived association to smoking strongest for low birth weight. Approximately 84 percent of respondents associated heavy drinking with increased risk for each of the suggested pregnancy outcomes. Smoking seemed to be perceived to pose a lesser risk to pregnancy than heavy drinking. This relative lack of awareness of the pregnancy risks of smoking was more apparent among respondents with less education and more pronounced among blacks than whites. Women were more likely than men to express some opinion on these pregnancy-related questions and were more cognizant than men of the risks. On this limited survey, Americans ages 18-44 were not very knowledgeable about fetal alcohol syndrome. Among the 55 percent who had heard of fetal alcohol syndrome, fewer than one in four correctly identified it as a set of birth defects when offered three possible definitions. It will be interesting to correlate responses to these "knowledge" questions with NHIS data still forthcoming on reported actual smoking and drinking behavior among women respondents who were recently pregnant.
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PMID:Perceptions of risks of smoking and heavy drinking during pregnancy: 1985 NHIS findings. 310 Nov 27

This is the first report of an adult patients with the fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) in Japan, who was treated for psychiatric disorders. The case was a 35 years-old woman who had many neuropsychiatric symptoms. She had been treated for 15 years at the Kurihama Alcoholism Center, for mental retardation, schizophrenic symptoms, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, learning disorder, trichotillomania, bipolar disorder, and impulsive behavior. She had low body weight at birth, mental retardation and a small facial malformation, which were diagnosed as FAS. At first admission, she was not diagnosed as FAS because her parent denied that her mother drank during pregnancy. Recently, her family admitted her mother's heavy drinking during pregnancy, and we diagnosed her as having FAS. She showed many pathological symptoms of the central nervous system such as very lower scores for performance IQ than for verbal IQ in the WAIS-R and enlargement of the lateral ventricle on MRI. Recently many reports have mentioned that prenatal alcohol exposure brings about severe damage of the central nervous system. Therefore, one author proposes that such disorders are referred to as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). This patient showed many symptoms of FASD, and was difficult to treat because of these symptoms.
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PMID:[Adult fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) with various nouropsychiatric symptoms]. 1557 76