Today, I’ll give a short summary of a few interesting talks I saw at the conference:
- Teenage smoking – Children of mothers who used drugs during pregnancy had abnormal stress hormone levels. When assessed over time, their abnormal stress response was associated with an earlier onset (age of first use) of cigarettes smoking and an increased amount and frequency of smoking cigarettes.
- Childhood trauma and drug use – Children who experienced excessive childhood trauma had altered brain activity (in the Nucleus Accumbens specifically) and showed increased anxiety. This area, which is important for essentially all learning, was differentially activated in a way that correlated with the amount of childhood trauma.
- Marijuana withdrawal and relapse to marijuana use – Marijuana withdrawal, which might soon be added to the APA‘s DSM (in version 5) was characterized as: Increased irritability, restlessness, and misery, reduced sleep quality, sleep duration, and food intake. When tested, restlessness, sleep disturbance, and early wakening were found to be predictors of relapse among participating marijuana users.