Brief intervention to reduce Alcohol Effected Pregnancies January 18, 2007
Posted by rickbarth in Uncategorized.add a comment
This post describes a promising approach to reducing alcohol effected pregancies (AEP)among young women who are at risk, via a four session counseling intervention, one contraception counseling visit, and one visit to health services. The counseled group had half the likelihood of a AEP as the control group. That is considerable and worth considering with regard to providing more basis for adding this form of intervention to our child welfare and maternal and child health work. Olds has shown–in his Nurse-Family Partnership work–that birth spacing adds a considerable amount to the many and long-term benefits of being in the treatment group. If this brief an intervention could achieve that level of impact, this would be big news indeed.
Brief Interventions Can Prevent Drinking During Pregnancy, Study Says
January 16, 2007
Research Summary
Researchers report that a series of five brief counseling sessions was effective in getting high-risk women to quit drinking during pregnancy and start using birth control, Reuters reported Jan. 12.A study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that women who took part in the counseling sessions and were interviewed nine months later were twice as likely to avoid risky drinking, use contraception, or both. “What we were able to do was to help the women become aware that they were at risk, and subsequently they made decisions to change their risk behavior,” said CDC researcher R. Louise Floyd.Prior to the study, the 830 women who took part in the study did not use reliable birth control and reported binge drinking or consumed eight or more alcoholic drinks per week. More than half were considered alcohol-dependent, more than 90 percent used illicit drugs, and more than 70 percent smoked.The study was published in the January 2007 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Reference:
Floyd, R.L., et. al. (2007) Preventing Alcohol-Exposed Pregnancies: A Randomized Controlled Trial. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 32(1): 1-10.
