Functional brain changes associated with FASD have also been examined with fMRI, which measures the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) change in the brain (i.e., the hemodynamic response). Neural activation differences associated with prenatal alcohol exposure as compared to healthy control subjects have been observed during several different cognitive tasks, including response inhibition [43, 44], working memory [45-50], arithmetic and number processing [51, 52] and verbal learning [53]. Many of these studies have been described in prior reviews [7, 9]. Of note is the large number of fMRI studies that report differences in activation among individuals with FASD in frontal regions relative to healthy controls regardless of the task used (refer to Supplementary Table 5).
