You might start with the La Leche site at http://www.llli.org/faq/alcohol.html

They list the following references:

References:

1. Marks V, Wright JW. Endocrinological and metabolic effects of alcohol. Proc R Soc Med 1977; 70(5):337-344.

2. De Rosa G, Corsello SM, Rufilli MP, Della CS, Pasargiklian E. Prolactin secretion after beer. Lancet 1982; 2(8252):934.

3. Carolson HE, Wasser HL, Reidelberger RD. Beer-induced prolactin secretion: a clinical and laboratory study of the role of salsolinol. J Clin Endocrinol Metab 1985; 60(4):673-677.

4. Koletzko B, Lehner F. Beer and breastfeeding. Adv Exp Med Biol 2000; 478:23-28.

5. Mennella JA, Beauchamp GK. The transfer of alcohol to human milk. Effects on flavor and the infant's behavior. N Engl J Med 1991; 325(14):981-985.

6. Cobo E. Effect of different doses of ethanol on the milk-ejecting reflex in lactating women. Am J Obstet Gynecol 1973; 115(6):817-821.

7. Mennella JA. Regulation of milk intake after exposure to alcohol in mothers' milk. Alcohol Clin Exp Res 2001; 25(4):590-593.

Interesting hypothesis. Coming from a maternal mental health perspective (and from my own experiences breastfeeding for 2+ years), I worry about yet another opportunity for mother-shaming. Given the ethical trickiness of exploring this question through rigorous research, we have to balance the evidence that does exist (including some good citations above) and common-sense support to empower women to make the best choices for themselves and their babies. 

One (perhaps obvious) but important point that is often ignored: exclusively breastfeeding a newborn is different from combination feeding, and also from breastfeeding an infant or toddler who also eats solids. Thus, there's a lot more within-person variability than is acknowledged re: how babies may be effected by what breastfeeding mom's ingest. 

You wrote, " my hypothesis is that maternal drinking while nursing, even very moderated amounts, is a LIFELONG risk factor in the child's later development of alcoholism."   Dear Dr. Clark Rector,  have you come in contact with  one or more cases in which maternal drinking while nursing, moderate amounts or high amounts led to LIFELONG risk of the child's later development of alcoholism? In other words, have you ever followed up the children who were born to a breast feeding alcoholic or alcohol drinkers?   With the breast feeding rates as low as they are today,  are there any fully breast feeding  alcohol drinkers?   I have never met one so I am curious if you have?   If not, it seems to me (as well as perhaps the other woman who responded), that your hypothesis, unintentionally I am sure, could be interpreted as mysogenistic, since, you do not mention the influence of the father and whether he  is also drinking with the mom and the influence of that.   And you also do not consider what it is like to fully breast feed an infant.   As a mother who has nursed 4 children, (nursed for 8 years of my life,)  a normal mother is way too tired to drink alcohol, because alcohol is a dehydrator, the opposite of what you want to do when you are nursing.  Alcohol decreases the body's production of anti-diuretic hormone, so acts as a diuretic at a time when you are trying to produce a liquid- so, alcohol drinking in a breast feeding mother who is socially with the program would be rare, to say the least.   And most importantly, drinking alcohol makes you tired, and a nursing mother is tired enough without adding to it by drinking alcohol.     She is not sleeping more than 2-3 hours at a time, and she is producing milk, which is fairly exhausting.  As a midwife for the past 33 years,  i have not personally come in contact with any mothers who drank alcohol while nursing, so I am very curious if you have.   The mothers who do, are likely to be problematic, to say the least, and not fully nursing anyway unless they want the infant to fail to live.

As we are all aware, alcoholism is passed from generation to generation, by example.    So the ideal case to prove any connection would be a baby who was breast fed by an alcoholic mother, and then given up for adoption at age 6 months, to a family of tea totalers.  But even that would not be a great case study, if you could find one, because being given away for adoption has its own stressors, and feelings of being rejected, and alcoholism has a genetic basis as well- as some people get greater pleasure from drinking alcohol than others.

 If much alcohol is passed to the newborn, the infants tend to have failure to thrive,   If the mother keeps drinking despite the fact that her child is not gaining weight, so there are many serious issues, more than alcoholism present.    If the mother drinks very little, then it does not affect the baby, because they get so little.    

So all things considered, i think your hypothesis is one that is not based in the realities of breast feeding and should be dropped and not investigated further for the reasons i have enumerated above.

Thank you for your thoughtful response. It is merely a hypotheses based on one example plus very basic behavioral psychology theory. I am very aware the hypothesis may be inaccurate overall. Certainly I do not intend misogynism and I offer my apologies to those who read it that way. Clearly my inquiry has raised some emotion. My original reason for asking it was that it struck me that researchers have apparently not looked exactly at this question specifically (i.e. LIFELONG or long-term effects) and I invite others to weigh in. 

I dont think your inquiry raised emotion.  I think it raised questions that you can answer. In the one case you had,  How much alcohol drinking was involved?  What time of day and what was the role of the father- was there a father involved in the raising of the newborn and how much drinking did he do?, How much breast feeding took place?   long did you follow up the long term effects of the newborn? Those are valid questions, raised by your post and deserve an answer in order to rationally consider your question.     I do not feel your inquiry raised emotion.   I think it would be helpfu if the above questions were answered because drinking alcohol and breast feeding are terms that need defining.

To Judy Slome Cohain, I don't have the answers to your questions. I wish I did! It appears that I have considerably less data on this than you have. It's very interesting to me, but not my major area of research. Nonetheless, the inquiry might be ripe for formal research. 

In my mind, even having a set of quantitative data looking at 'drinking while breastfeeding' (e.g. perhaps "3-6 drinks/week" or specify the number of drinks) and 'child's later development of alcoholism,' or 'child's later number of weekly drinks' or something like that, might shed some quantitative light to see if any correlation may exist between the two. It may be a bit tricky, but ideally other factors would be included as well (e.g. history of parent's alcohol use, proportion of breastfeeding to other infant foods used, drinking culture in household, milk allergies and other breastfeeding difficulties, alcohol use in child's childhood and adolescence, development of child's non-alcohol addictions). The data could be gathered by interview or survey from mother-child pairs, where the child is at least, say, 30 years of age. If anyone has already systematically done this by some chance, for any level of drinking while nursing, it would be exciting to see the results. From what I've casually seen so far, the literature only looks at immediate effects of alcohol in mother's milk.

Cordially,

Clark

Alcohol is associated, sometimes causally, with many adverse health outcomes in adults. It is not a natural food for new born babies and does appear in breast milk if the mother has been drinking alcohol. The newborn infant brain is undergoing a period of rapid growth and connectivity and is vulnerable to insults that may lead to long term damage. Alcohol is one possible insult. It would therefore seem logical that medical advice to all breastfeeding women should be to try to abstain from drinking alcohol while breastfeeding. That advice is also given to pregnant women in most parts of the developed world. I do not see offering such advice as being unreasonable or misogynistic even although abstaining from breast feeding may not be an obtainable goal for some.