Abstract
Methamphetamine is one of the most common illicit drug abused in the Czech Republic. The amount of high-risk abusers is still increasing.
Statistics have shown that high percent of drug addictive women switch to MA when become pregnant. As MA crosses the placental barrier, the development of affected fetuses may be impaired.
Previous studies demonstrated that MA use during pregnancy impair morphological and neural development. The offspring of drug-addictive mothers are also often neglected and exposed to neonatal stressors.
Early life experience such as child neglect and maternal separation is associated with impairment of neurological development and may lead to various pathologies in adulthood. Such exposure to neonatal stress could produce long-term increase in HPA axis responsiveness, anxiety, depression, changes in sexual behavior and drug abuse in adulthood.
Our data showed that combination of perinatal stress and prenatal MA has a detrimental effect on maternal behavior as well as on sensorimotor development of their pups. MA exposure during pregnancy seems to be a decisive factor for those impairments.
However, our other recent results have shown a predominant influence of postnatal stress leading to cognitive functions' deficit in adult offspring.