Stimulants like methamphetamine deplete dopamine, which is the primary chemical in the "reward pathway" of the brain, Miotto says. "If you ask police, they'll tell you 'we can tell it's a meth house because the washing machine is taken apart in the front yard,'" Miotto said.Įven if a methamphetamine user gets treatment for his or her addiction and recovers without a permanent psychosis, depression may soon follow. In Cross it appeared as writing, in others it shows up as the need to constantly pick things apart and try to put them back together - usually unsuccessfully. But you can't do that here.Alongside hallucinations and delusions, Miotto says methamphetamine can induce traits similar to obsessive-compulsiveness called "tweaking" on the streets. "It's important to recognize complexity," LaGasse told Shots. "These kids are vulnerable, and they get raised in vulnerable environments." The drug exposure becomes just one of the many difficulties that can cause long-term problems for a child. She also studies the effect of cocaine exposure on children. "A lot of times families that are involved illicit drugs have many other issues," LaGasse says. Those factors can have powerful effects on a child's behavior. The researchers tried hard to adjust for other issues in the family's life, including poverty, psychological problems in the mother, family instability and the mother's occupation. It was published in the journal Pediatrics. It's the first and only long-term study of the effects of prenatal meth exposure, LaGasse says. Both groups of children acted like that at age 3, but kids who hadn't been exposed to drugs outgrew the behavior as they neared school age. That was especially true in children whose mothers were heavy users. And they were also more likely to show aggressive behavior and symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity at age 5. The meth-exposed children were more likely to be emotionally reactive, anxious, and depressed at age 3. It then compared their behavior to that of similar children who hadn't been exposed to drugs. This new study, researchers followed 166 children in the Midwest and West who had been exposed to the stimulant methamphetamine before birth. Since then, it's become clear that while crack-exposed children do have differences in thinking and behavior, those differences are subtle in most cases.
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This first study to track the health of meth-exposed children brings up memories of the "crack baby" stories of the early 1990s.īack then, the newspapers were full of horror stories predicting that the crack cocaine epidemic would produce a generation of severely damaged children. "But they do have problems that are worthy of note."
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"These kids are not cracked and broken," says Linda LaGasse, an associate professor of pediatrics and Brown University Medical School, and lead author of the study. But those problems are manageable, the researchers say, especially if the children and their parents get help early on. Children exposed to meth may have more problems with anxiety and depression.Ĭhildren who are exposed to methamphetamine before birth can have behavior problems as young as age 3, a new study finds.
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