PRENATAL COCAINE EXPOSURE EFFECTS ON LEARNING IN RATS

联邦政府和州政府有责任提供教育

Federal and state governments have a responsibility to provide education which is tailored to the ability of each individual child. With a prevalence of cocaine abuse among pregnant women, it is critical to determine if their exposed children exhibit learning and/or memory deficits that would require special educational attention. The validity of human studies is compromised by confounding variables which are difficult to control for. The main objective of this project is to generate an animal-learning preparation which institutes complicated learning tasks that could target the teratogenic effects of cocaine exposure and be adapted for human screening purposes. Gravid dams will be randomly assigned to either a low-dose cocaine treatment group, a high- dose cocaine treatment group, a vehicle and pair-fed control group, or an untreated control group to determine if adult offspring of the cocaine- treated dams show a learning deficit.