Association of Father's Drinking and Infant's Birth Weight

Abstract

To the Editor: We report an association between fathers' alcohol use in the month before conception and the weight of their infants at birth. This serendipitous finding arose from a study of the familial aggregation of birth weights in humans and how it was influenced by maternal drinking and smoking. A consecutive sample of prenatal patients at a health maintenance organization who reported drinking regularly in the month before or during pregnancy was matched for smoking with a group of randomly selected occasional drinkers. ("Regular" drinking was defined as the consumption of an average of at least 30 ml of . . .