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.
| Brunzell, Darlene H; Coy, Abigail E; Ayres, John J B et al. (2002) Prenatal cocaine effects on fear conditioning: exaggeration of sex-dependent context extinction. Neurotoxicol Teratol 24:161-72 |
| Brunzell, Darlene H; Ayres, John J B; Meyer, Jerrold S (2002) Effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on latent inhibition in 1-year-old female rats. Pharmacol Biochem Behav 72:795-802 |
