Sponsor
This work was supported by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (L30 DA027582, T32 DA07262), the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (T32 ES007060-31A1), the Oregon Clinical Translational Research Institute (UL1 RR024140, and the Husson University School of Pharmacy
Published In
PLoS ONE
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-22-2014
Subjects
Child mental health, Executive function (Neuropsychology), Cognitive neuroscience, Children of drug abusers, Drug abuse in pregnancy
Abstract
Adoptive children are at increased risk for problematic behaviors but the origin of these individual differences in neurobehavioral function is unclear. This investigation examined whether adopted children with prenatal exposure to a wide variety of recreational drugs exhibited higher scores (i.e. more problems) with executive function and psychiatric symptomology. Caregivers of children ages 5 to 18 completed an online survey with items about use of alcohol, nicotine, or methamphetamine during pregnancy followed by the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF, N = 437 including 59 adoptive parents) or the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL, N = 549 including 54 adoptive parents). Relative to a comparison group of children raised by their biological parents, adoptive children that were polysubstance exposed during prenatal development exhibited higher rates of academic difficulties and were behind their classmates in math and reading. Adoptive children had statistically and clinically significant higher BRIEF ratings and this pattern was similar for boys and girls. CBCL ratings were significantly increased in adoptive children, particularly for Externalizing and Attention problems. Adoptive children with a history of polysubstance exposures including alcohol, nicotine, and methamphetamine are at heightened risk for difficulties with executive function as well as various psychopathologies. These findings suggest that increased monitoring to identify and implement remediation strategies may be warranted for adopted children with a history of in utero drug exposures.
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0110459
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/12955
Citation Details
Piper BJ, Gray HM, Corbett SM, Birkett MA, Raber J (2014) Executive Function and Mental Health in Adopted Children with a History of Recreational Drug Exposures. PLoS ONE 9(10): e110459. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0110459
Description
Copyright 2014 Piper et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.