Cocaine: Translational Effects on Infant Vocalizations and Maternal Response

有婴幼儿的妇女吸食可卡因与忽视儿童高度相关。母亲和婴儿分别在照顾和引起照顾方面发挥重要作用，因此药物使用或婴儿产前接触药物可能在产妇护理中断中发挥互动作用。尽管在这一人群中被忽视的比例很高，但人们对可卡因的使用是如何干扰母婴互动的知之甚少。可卡因诱导的母性忽视大鼠模型表明，在产后早期，药物治疗组和对照组的母性对可卡因暴露婴儿的行为表现出延迟或减少。在接受可卡因治疗的母亲中，延迟的母性行为更为明显。这些数据表明，在动物模型中，可卡因引起的母亲和婴儿的变化都会影响产妇护理的质量。由于类似的行为变化在人类和非人类研究中都有报道，一个旨在检查人类和动物模型的转化项目可以更直接地评估影响母亲和婴儿相互作用的特定的、高度相关的行为的变化。

Cocaine use by women with infants and young children is highly correlated with child neglect. Both mothers and infants play important roles in care-giving and elicitation of care respectively, so drug use or infant prenatal exposure to drugs likely play an interactive role in the disruption of maternal care. Despite the high rate of neglect in this population, little is understood about how cocaine use specifically interferes with maternal-infant interactions. A rat model of cocaine-induced maternal neglect indicated that rodent mothers from both drug- treated and control groups exhibited delayed or lessened maternal behavior towards cocaine-exposed infants during the early postpartum period. Delayed maternal behavior was even more pronounced in cocaine-treated mothers. These data imply that in animal models, cocaine-induced changes in both mother and infant influence quality of maternal care. Since similar behavioral changes are reported in both human and non- human studies, a translational project aimed at examining human and animal models can more directly assess changes in specific, highly relevant behaviors of mothers and infants that affect their interactions. Human and rodent mothers attend to infant vocalizations. Vocalizations of cocaine-exposed infants may be altered, and thus elicit differential care from mothers. The specific aims of this project focus on understanding why mothers who abuse drugs during pregnancy, specifically cocaine, show an increase in neglectful behavior towards their infant, and if cries produced from these infants contribute to neglectful care received. It will be determined if a) prenatal cocaine exposure in human and rodent infants results in changes in specific cry characteristics and b) if these differences alter human and rodent maternal response to the cries, particularly in drug-exposed mothers. The proposed experiments will be the first systematic evaluation of these measures in both human and animal models simultaneously. The long-term objectives serve to determine how cocaine exposure affects early nurturing behavior and maternal-infant interactions and whether a common mechanism underlying one aspect of human and animal cocaine-induced neglect is involved.