Correlates of psychopathology and intelligence in children with fetal alcohol syndrome.

Abstract

After documenting the wide range of psychopathology and impairment of intellectual functioning in earlier contributions, the present report from long-term observations of an extended cohort of children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) deals with correlates of psychopathology and intelligence in these children. At preschool age, severity of morphological damage, the type of milieu, sex and IQ were significant predictors of psychopathology. In another subgroup of school-aged children, these associations were less strong; only severity of morphological damage and IQ still correlated to some extent significantly with psychopathology. Intelligence was significantly impaired in those children with severe morphological damage who were raised in institutions.