Impact of early developmental experience on cocaine-stress interactions in adulthood: An exploration of behavioural, physiological, and neural mechanisms

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The effects of early developmental experience can be pervasive and long lasting, and can impact on fundamental neural and motivational systems relating to the processing of emotional-, stress-, and reward-relevant information. Because these systems interact and adapt in a dynamic and complex way, it is important to understand how their acute activation is influenced by past experience. From this perspective, it is of interest that the effects of maternal exposure to psychostimulants before pregnancy can be transmitted to the next generation, resulting in enhanced sensitivity to the effects (e.g., stimulant and anxiety-like) of drugs like cocaine in adult offspring . Likewise, exposure to stress during the early postnatal period (i.e., infancy), a critical time for development of reward- and stress-related systems of the brain, can lead to long-term changes in emotionality, and in behavioural and neural responses to psychostimulants.