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One Kind Of Abuse Leads to Another
Study shows link between child abuse and drugs
W A S H I N G T O N, Repeated sexual abuse makes physical changes in the brain, changes that can explain why abused children often use illegal drugs later in life, researchers said last week.
They found that children who were sexually abused had changes in the blood flow and function of a brain region called the cerebellar vermis, which is also known to change when people abuse drugs.
"This part of the brain has been recently implicated in the coordination of emotional behavior, is strongly affected by alcohol, cocaine, and other drugs of abuse, and may help regulate dopamine, a neurotransmitter
critically involved in addiction," McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where the study was done, said in a statement.
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Writing in the January issue of the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, Carl Anderson and colleagues said they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brains of 32 adults, aged 18 to 22. Half had
been abused as children.
They homed in on the cerebellar vermis because it develops slowly and can be affected easily by stress hormones.
"Damage to this area of the brain may cause an individual to be particularly irritable, and to seek external means, such as drugs or alcohol, to quell this irritability," Anderson said in a statement.
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A second study published this week showed related results.
A team at the University of Buffalo in New York found that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can increase the craving for drugs in abusers.
Psychiatry professor Scott Coffey and colleagues at the Medical University of South Carolina tested 30 cocaine-dependent and 45 alcohol-dependent volunteers, all of whom also suffered from PTSD resulting from a
physical or sexual attack.
They made the...»»
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