Early Nurturing Can Deter Later Drug Use

Good news: Moms may have more control than they think over keeping their kids off drugs – and it starts in early childhood. A new study conducted by Duke University and the University of Adelaide in Australia seems to prove that an attentive, nurturing mother may be able to help her children better resist the temptations of drug use later in life.

The study was conducted on rats and showed that a rat mother's attention in early childhood actually changes the immune response in the brains of her pups by permanently altering genetic activity, according to Staci Bilbo, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, who led the research. Interestingly enough, high-touch mothering increased the brain's production of an immune system molecule called Interleukin-10, leaving these rats better able to resist the temptation of a dose of morphine much later in life.

This is the first study to show how morphine causes a molecular response in the glial cells of the brain's reward centers, which had only recently been identified as part of drug addiction's circuitry.

To find out what that response looked like, the researchers used a technique called the "handling paradigm," in which very young rat pups are removed from their mother's cage for 15 minutes and then returned. "As soon as they're returned, she checks them out vigorously," grooming the pups and cleaning them, Bilbo said. For a control group, another set of pups were never removed. Some of them had more attentive mothers than others, just by natural variation. 

The animals then were put through a test called the "place preference chamber," a two-roomed cage in which they would be given a dose of morphine if they entered one side, or a dose of saline on the other. Over the next four weeks, the rats were returned to the two-sided chamber three times a week for five minutes, but were never given another dose of morphine. Initially, they all showed a preference for the morphine side, but over time, the handled rats showed little preference, which indicated their craving had been "extinguished," Bilbo said. 

"Two exciting things have been uncovered by this groundbreaking research," said coauthor Mark Hutchinson, a research fellow at the University of Adelaide. "One, we have proven a mother's touch changes brain function and two, we have demonstrated an exciting way to intervene in the cycle of drug abuse."

Next up, Bilbo’s team plans to look at the long-term effects of maternal stress on the brain's immune response. They'll be working with the Children's Environmental Health Initiative at Duke, which examines real-world environmental health effects in Durham, NC in collaboration with the US Environmental Protection Agency.

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