4 Troubled Teens Blog

Women who use methamphetamine when they are pregnant are putting their babies at risk for structural abnormal abnormalities in the brain, according to a new study from the University of California in Los Angeles.

Researchers had trouble finding women who used methamphetamine but did not combine it with alcohol.

"About half the women who say they use meth during pregnancy also use alcohol," said Professor Elizabeth Sowell, author of the study, "so isolating the effects of meth on the developing brain was difficult."

• Dr. Sowell and her colleagues performed brain scans on 61 children, average age 11 years old.
  
• Thirteen had been exposed to alcohol only, 21 had pre-natal exposure to methamphetamine and alcohol, and 27 were exposed to neither.
  
• Dr. Sowell found that brain regions in the children exposed to methamphetamine were similarly damaged as those in the alcohol exposed children, and in some areas they were smaller or larger.

"The tragedy is that all these developmental problems are 100 percent avoidable," said Dr. Sowell, writing in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Labels: pregnancy, mothers, brain_chemistry, meth

Posted By: Aspen/CRC