  
Early ecstasy exposure impairs cognitive development in animal model
Last Updated: 2001-05-02 13:00:17 EDT (Reuters Health)
By Anthony J. Brown, MD
WESTPORT, CT (Reuters Health) - Maternal abuse of ecstasy during late pregnancy may have long-term deleterious effects on the child's learning and memory, based on the findings of an animal study published in the May 1st issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.
Dr. Charles V. Vorhees and colleagues from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Ohio assessed the effects of 3,4-methlyenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, 'ecstasy') exposure in neonatal rats. The rats were exposed to MDMA on postnatal days 1 through 10 or on days 11 through 20. The two exposure periods are analogous to early and late third-trimester fetal exposure in humans.
MDMA exposure reduced body weight gain during treatment, but it had no effect on survival, the authors note. Rats in the late-exposure group showed dose-related impairments of sequential and spatial learning and memory, while rats in the early exposure group showed almost no impairments.
"There really has been no data in humans about the possible outcomes of ecstasy use during pregnancy," Dr. Vorhees told Reuters Health.
"The fact that early-exposed rats did not show significant impairments supports the idea of windows of vulnerability during development," Dr. Vorhees noted. "Any particular organ has its own separate period when it is undergoing rapid development and is very sensitive to possible disruption."
"The current findings with ecstasy are a little bit different from those of a similar study we did on methamphetamine exposure," Dr. Vorhees pointed out. "Methamphetamine exposure seems to only affect spatial learning, not sequential learning," he explained.
"In the rat, the harmful effects from ecstasy exposure appear to last into adulthood," Dr. Vorhees said. "In the future, we plan to follow exposed animals to 6 months and a year of age, roughly middle-age for the rat, to see if the effects from ecstasy are still present."
"Although the brains of treated animals did show some smalls changes in serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine levels, most of them were not significant," Dr. Vorhees said. "Most of the changes did not correlate at all with the behavioral changes," he added.
"We are not really sure what the underlying change in the brain is, but we have started using the new gene chip technology and we have gotten some possible leads," he said.
J Neurosci 2001;21:3228-3235.
-Westport Newsroom 203 319 2700
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