Tracking simple eye movements could help diagnose fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, Canadian researchers propose.

Health Canada estimates that every day at least one child is born with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), the most common birth defect in the country. It can lead to deformities, learning disabilities, hyperactivity, short attention span and memory problems.

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, or FASD, include a wider array of developmental delays than the more severe fetal alcohol syndrome, but FASD is harder for doctors to diagnose accurately because there are few diagnostic tools.

James Reynolds, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., came up with the idea of using eye movements to assess brain function in people with FASD during a conversation on an airplane as he returned from a neuroscience conference.

Reynolds teamed up with Queen's colleague Doug Munoz to test if eye movement, or oculomotor, tasks would work to assess FASD in children.

The team compared the oculomotor performance of 10 children with the disorder to 12 children without it. Their findings appear in the March issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

"We found that FASD children had much longer reaction times — defined as the time required to initiate eye movement — both towards and away from the peripheral visual target," Reynolds said in a release.

Children with FASD also made more directional errors compared to children without FASD, they found.

The researchers are now using a mobile eye-tracker device to research the method in the community, since many children affected by prenatal exposure to alcohol live in rural areas that lack diagnostic clinics.

They plan to test the idea for other developmental disorders, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Likewise, in the February issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, researchers in New York reported that abnormalities in eye movements can be used to distinguish people at risk for schizophrenia.