A new study from scholars at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the department of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego has identified an increase in prenatal alcohol exposure over the past decade.
While the estimates of alcohol use during pregnancy remained relatively stable since the 1990s, national data has not been updated since 2020. To provide a more recent update on prenatal alcohol exposure, the authors analyzed data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey regarding alcohol use, binge drinking, and heavy drinking among 33,729 pregnant women in the United States from 2011 to 2024.
Past-month alcohol use among pregnant women rose from 9 percent in 2011–2012 to a peak of 15 percent in 2021–2022, followed by a small decline to 14.5 percent in 2023–2024. Binge drinking and heavy drinking also increased over this time period, reaching 4.6 percent and 2 percent, respectively, by 2023–2024. Additionally, the research team found a strong association between tobacco use and higher-risk drinking in pregnant women. Among those who reported binge or heavy drinking, more than two thirds also reported tobacco use.
“When we adjusted for long-term trends using statistical models, we found that each successive two-year period was associated with higher odds of current alcohol use, binge drinking, and heavy drinking during the past month,” said lead author Emile Bruzelius, a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia’s Substance Abuse Epidemiology Training Program. “These findings indicate statistically significant increases across the study period.”