The six-year-old boy plays the game Operation, skillfully wielding a pair of tweezers in a school gym that doubles as a research lab. His brain has been damaged by the alcohol his mother drank when he was in the womb, but he's adept at extracting tiny plastic bones.
“When it gets too easy we will have him switch to his left hand,” says Chris Bertram, a scientist at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C., who is investigating whether children with a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FASD, can rewire their brains by improving their strongest motor skills. Advances in understanding neuroplasticity, or how experience can change the brain, have led to therapies that have helped people who have suffered strokes or traumatic brain injuries learn to speak again or move paralyzed limbs. Now, a growing number of scientists hope the revolution can help children whose brains were damaged by alcohol before they were born.
They are testing different approaches – including computer games and other specialized training – in hopes of helping kids with FASD strengthen connections in their brains and boost their cognitive skills.
Dr. Bertram and his colleagues have assessed all eight kids with FASD who are hard at play at various stations in the gymnasium. All are good at something, perhaps the fine motor skills needed to pluck a rib out of a cartoonish chest or the co-ordination needed for the interactive videogame Dance Dance Revolution.
But they have a wide variety of cognitive and emotional problems that include trouble paying attention, remembering what they have learned, anticipating the consequences of their actions and controlling their impulses. Hyperactivity is common; they can be challenging to manage at home and at school. Dr. Bertram's hypothesis is that the eight-week program will do more than just improve their rope climbing and free-throw shooting.
The idea is that improving one area of brain function, in this case motor skills, will also boost their ability to pay attention and to regulate their impulses. He is still analyzing the data from the 35 kids who have been through the program, but the preliminary results have been encouraging, he says.
“We call it transfer of learning, or transfer of performance,” Dr. Bertram says.
Alcohol damages many parts of the developing brain, says Christian Beaulieu, a brain imaging expert at the University of Alberta. It can affect areas and structures critical for memory, learning and abstract thinking. He and his colleagues have shown it also damages white matter, the connections that allow parts of the brain to communicate and work together.
But recent experiments with laboratory animals offer hope. At the University of Victoria, Brian Christie has been able to reverse the brain damage caused by fetal alcohol exposure in rats by getting them to exercise.
No one expects it will be so easy in humans.
“The rat brain doesn't have the same complexities,” says Dr. Christie, a member of B.C's Brain Research Centre.
Dr. Bertram says that many of the current therapies or interventions being used with children with FASD focus on their deficits – for example, anger management therapy for a child who is acting out in school or extra time devoted to reading or math for a child struggling in those subjects.
“Traditional intervention programs have these kids doing things their brains are not adept at doing, and their success rates are not great. We flipped things around and said, ‘Why don't we build intervention programs based on things they are good at.' ”
