Prenatal Polydrug Exposure: Effects of Timing on Functional Connectivity at Birth

COEX 

Prenatal drug exposure (PDE) impacts infant brain development with documented long-term consequences (Ross 2015). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of infants and youth with PDE reveal aberrant brain functional connectivity (Salzwedel 2020). Animal models demonstrate that PDE timing significantly impacts offspring outcome (Byrnes 2018), but most human fMRI studies use a binary categorization to assess drug exposure, limiting the ability to detect timing effects associated with PDE. Here, we use resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) to characterize timing-related effects of PDE on the neonatal functional connectome. For the first time, we examine neural mechanisms associated with full PDE across all three trimesters (PDE-F) and partial PDE during only the first and/or second trimester (PDE-T1T2).