Maternal drinking of alcohol: the newborn has the worst hangover

Abstract

In this issue of The Journal of Physiology, Dubois et al. (2008) report that breathing is greatly altered in animals born of mothers who consumed alcohol during the pregnancy. Upon finishing the paper by Dubois et al. we are not left with the dual questions which are often asked of contemporary studies in respiratory neurophysiology: What does this mean? How do these findings related to normal breathing in an intact animal? In many studies, investigators must attempt to fit results from greatly reduced preparations, containing only limited portions of the brainstem respiratory control system, into various models as to how normal breathing is generated. This task becomes especially daunting as the brainstem respiratory control system can generate multiple types of breathing, in addition to normal breathing or eupnoea. One other type of breathing is gasping, which replaces normal breathing under conditions of severe hypoxia or ischaemia, and can serve as a mechanism of autoresuscitation to restart normal breathing. Much experimental evidence supports the conclusion that different brainstem mechanisms are responsible for generating normal breathing and gasping (Paton et al. 2006; Paton & St.-John, 2007). Other breathing patterns may represent variants of eupnoea or gasping or, in fact, may be generated by other neurophysiological mechanisms in different regions of the brainstem (Smith et al. 2007). Thus, are results from reduced preparations applicable to the genesis and control of eupnoea, gasping or neither of these breathing patterns?