Crack Babies Are Turning Out Okay

Major study concludes that crack panic was overblown. In an excellent story for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Susan FitzGerald traces the fortunes of Philadelphia children enrolled in a study that began in 1989, at the height of the crack “epidemic” in the U.S. Headed up by Hallam Hurt, then the chair of neonatology at Albert Einstein Medical Center, a group began the in-vitro study of babies exposed to maternal crack cocaine use. One of the longest-running studies of its kind, the NIDA-funded research on 224 babies born between 1989 and 1992, half of them cocaine-exposed, the other half normal controls, was now coming to a close. And the results were not what most people were expecting. In the Inquirer article, Hurt notes that cocaine can in fact trigger premature labor, raise blood pressure, and risk a condition in which the placenta breaks loose from the uterine wall. So it was natural to go looking for long-term effects in all of those twitching, underweight newborn crack babies viewers  saw on television. Physicians warned that damage to developing dopamine systems would result in long-term or permanent impairments in attention, language, and memory. So Hurt and colleagues went looking—and couldn’t find them. Neither could researchers at other institutions.  Said Hurt: “We began to ask, ‘Was there something else going on?’” As FitzGerald writes: “The years of tracking kids have led Hurt to a conclusion she didn’t see coming. ‘Poverty is a...
Source: Addiction Inbox - Category: Addiction Authors: Source Type: blogs