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The Detection of Fetal Alcohol Exposure by FAEEs Meconium Analysis

  • Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (EF Furtado, Section Editor)
  • Published:
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Abstract

Fetal alcohol exposure can be assessed either retrospectively by directly asking mothers or reliable informants through structured interviews and screening questionnaires or actually by measuring biomarkers of alcohol consumption in pregnancy or in the perinatal phase. For research purposes and even in some clinical cases with a need for objective corroboration of the information given by the mother or when this information is missing, there is the possibility of laboratory assessment of alcohol biomarkers. This review will present the current state of the art of FAEE (fatty acid ethyl esters) meconium analysis. An electronic search of computerized databases was carried out on an English language database (PubMed). The searched keywords in PubMed were “fatty acid ethyl ester AND meconium”. The search was limited to the English language. The PubMed search resulted in 67 articles of which 23 were excluded by the analysis of titles and abstracts. The most frequently employed assay methods were: GC-MS (40.9 %), followed by LC-MS/MS (36.4 %), GC-FID (9.1 %), and GC-FID confirmed by GC-MS (13.6 %).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Neurosciences and Behaviour, School of Medicine of Ribeirao Preto, University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil

    Fabiana Spineti dos Santos & Erikson Felipe Furtado

  2. Departamento de Química, Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, University of Sao Paulo, Ribeirao Preto, Brazil

    Fabiana Spineti dos Santos & Bruno Spinosa de Martinis

Authors
  1. Fabiana Spineti dos Santos
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  2. Bruno Spinosa de Martinis
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  3. Erikson Felipe Furtado
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Correspondence to Erikson Felipe Furtado.

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Conflict of Interest

Fabiana Spineti dos Santos reports a grant from FAPESP - São Paulo Research Foundation.

Bruno Spinosa de Martinis and Erikson Felipe Furtado declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

Additional information

This article is part of the Topical Collection on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome

Glossary

E12:0

Ethyl laurate

E14:0

Ethyl myristate

E17:0

Ethyl heptadecanoate

E16:0

Ethyl palmitate

E16:1

Ethyl palmitoleate

E18:0

Ethyl stearate

E18:1

Ethyl oleate

E18:2

Ethyl linoleate

E18:3

Ethyl linolenate

E20:4

Ethyl arachidonate

FAEEs

Fatty acid ethyl esters

GC-FID

Gas Chromatography - Flame Ionization Detector

GC-MS

Gas Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry

HS-SPME

Headspace – Solid Phase Microextraction

LC-MS

Liquid Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry

LLE

Liquid-Liquid Extraction

MAE

Microwave Assisted Extraction

SPE

Solid Phase Extraction

SPME

Solid Phase Microextraction

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dos Santos, F.S., de Martinis, B.S. & Furtado, E.F. The Detection of Fetal Alcohol Exposure by FAEEs Meconium Analysis. Curr Dev Disord Rep 3, 235–241 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40474-016-0102-x

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