There was a bit of interesting news out of Canada on Friday. Researchers at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario have developed a simple eye-movement test that can identify children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.

FASD is umbrella term that describes a number of problems caused by prenatal exposure to alcohol. Those problems include Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Alcohol-Related Birth Defects, Fetal Alcohol Effects and Alcohol-Related Neurological Disorders. As I noted in my earlier post on FAS, these problems can be very difficult to diagnose.

The Canadian university said that the researchers have already tested more than 100 children in both urban and rural communities across Ontario. They found that children with FASD have specific brain abnormalities that can be measured with eye-movement testing. The researchers said that children with FASD take longer to initiate eye movement than age-matched control subjects, and they make more directional errors.

There are a couple of other things that sound promising about this work, even though it is for the moment focused on Canadian children. First, it could eventually offer adoptive parents of children from Russia another way to ascertain and address the health issues their children face. It might even be something that could eventually used by Russian health professionals at the orphanages. Instead of using pricey neuroimaging technology available only in the most sophisticated medical facilities, the researchers did their testing using a mobile eye-tracker unit hooked up to a laptop computer.

And there's more. Queen's University Pharmacology and Toxicology Professor James Reynolds and graduate student Courtney Green are now undertaking a larger study with research centers across Canada that will involve hundreds of children. They believe that this will help them refine a diagnostic tool to identify FASD children. The pair's initial findings, which compared 10 children ages eight to 12 who have FASD with 12 children without FASD, are published in the March issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

They also plan to join forces with the university's Centre for Neuroscience Studies, to use magnetic resonance imaging to measure differences in brain activity in children with developmental disorders such as FASD and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The goal is to build a shared database that spans many developmental disorders.

What do you do as a parent about all this? I'll admit that studies like these raise as many questions as they answer. But I think I'll bring along the information on the study to my next visit with my kid's eye doctor (which conveniently happens to be this afternoon), and let him read up on it.