Cocaine Wreaks Subtle Damage on Developing Brains

摘要

It had started to look like yesterday's scare story. Beginning about a decade ago, countless reports on television and in newspapers and magazines presented the image of the sickly, inattentive, and inconsolable "crack baby." The fear was that the infants, who had been exposed to cocaine when their mothers abused the drug while pregnant, had suffered severe, irreversible damage, including reduced intelligence and social skills. But in recent years the news has swung to the opposite extreme: In several follow-up studies conducted on preschoolers and school-age children, researchers could link no significant reductions in intelligence to cocaine exposures in the womb.