A new study from the University of Iowa may have discovered one reason for child neglect in drug-addicted mothers.

Lane Strathearn, a UI professor of pediatrics, and Assistant Professor Sohye Kim of the Baylor College of Medicine recently collaborated on a study that produced data on the correlation between drug use and the disassociation that drug-addicted mothers may feel about their children.

The data, recently published online in the journal Human Brain Mapping, is on the second phase of a five-year study funded by the National Institute of Drug Use. It shows how drug use affects the way that new mothers respond to their infants’ facial expressions.

Researchers studied mothers who were enrolled in a treatment program for drug addiction, videotaping them with their babies smiling and crying. They then took stills from the videos and showed them to the mothers while undergoing an MRI, which picked up differences in blood flow in the brain that correlate to brain stimuli.

“Normally, when a mother sees her own baby, particularly when smiling, it produces an increase in brain response in reward areas,” Strathearn said. “We were very surprised to find that in these mothers, we actually saw a deactivation in these areas.”

[For more of this story, written by Jordan Prochnow, go to http://daily-iowan.com/2017/09...ction-child-neglect/]