Pregnant mice given alcohol produce offspring with limb malformations, but giving the animals an antioxidant with the alcohol reduces the number and severity of the defects, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill report.

“The results of this study show that maternal antioxidant treatment is effective in diminishing major malformations caused by prenatal ethanol exposure,” Dr. Shao-yu Chen and colleagues write in a report in FASEB-J, the journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

There’s scant experimental evidence to support the idea that antioxidants could be a “potential therapeutic approach” for preventing human fetal alcohol syndrome, Chen’s group notes.

To investigate, they gave pregnant mice two injections of ethanol four hours apart either alone or in combination with EUK-134, a potent antioxidant. A group of pregnant control mice were given the antioxidant or a placebo, but no ethanol.

The researchers found that 67 percent of ethanol-exposed mouse fetuses exhibited forelimb defects compared with none of the fetuses from placebo-treated litters.

Administration of EUK-134 with ethanol significantly reduced the percentage of fetuses with limb malformations to 36 percent.

Additionally, the researchers say, less severe deformities were far more common in the affected limbs of fetuses treated with the alcohol-antioxidant than in those from the fetuses exposed to ethanol alone.

Chen and colleagues say the results give hope that antioxidants could lessen the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure in the children of women who are unable or unwilling to curtail their alcohol abuse while pregnant.

SOURCE: FASEB-J, published online June 18, 2004.