Pregnant women who abuse alcohol may reduce the risk of birth defects in their babies by taking antioxidants during pregnancy, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study indicates. The new research found a 36 percent reduction in limb malformations in the offspring of pregnant mice exposed to ethanol and at the same time given a newly developed antioxidant compound called EUK-134. The study appears on-line Friday (June 18) in FASEB-J, the journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
