FROM MOTHER WITH LOVE

Now there is hard evidence that ecstasy damages developing brains

Pregnant women who take ecstasy risk causing long-term damage to the brains
of their children, a study on rats has suggested.

"Now we have a real identified risk, whereas before all we could do was
advise pregnant mothers not to take drugs as a precautionary measure," says
Charles Vorhees, head of the team that made the discovery at the University
of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Ohio.

"This is a real landmark study," says Lynn Singer, a paediatrics expert at
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio.
"It's the first developmental study suggesting ecstasy exposure can affect
basic learning processes."

Vorhees's team attempted to mimic in rats the effects of ecstasy on the
most important stages of human brain development in the last three months
of pregnancy.

They gave half the rats ecstasy twice a day for the first 10 days of life.
At this age, they are at the same stage of brain development as a human
fetus between 24 and 30 weeks old. The other half were given ecstasy when
they were between 10 and 20 days old, equivalent to the last six weeks of
human pregnancy. Other rats were given salt solution as a control.

When the rats reached maturity 60 days later, Vorhees gave them standard
tests to measure brain function. The only rats to underperform were those
that had received ecstasy 10 to 20 days after birth. This tallied with
damage to the hippocampus, the part of the brain vital for memory.

In one test to measure spatial awareness and sense of direction, the rats
had to locate a submerged platform in a pool. The rats who had received
ecstasy later in their development performed between 30 and 50 per cent
worse than controls. In people, this might manifest itself as a poor sense
of direction, says Vorhees.

In a second test to measure memorydependent learning, rats had to swim and
climb their way out of a labyrinth of water channels. Again, those given
the drug later performed worst, making between 25 and 40 per more errors
than controls. In people, this might affect their ability to carry out
sequences of tasks, such as assembling flatpacked furniture or following a
recipe.

"What was surprising was that ecstasy has such a large effect," says
Vorhees. But when he looked at the brains of the animals afterwards he
failed to find the telltale ecstasy damage usually found in adult rats,
which is caused by high levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin.

Vorhees believes this may be because, in the developing brain, serotonin
helps brain cells to grow connections rather than acting as a
neurotransmitter. "It must work through a different pathway," he says.

Singer has done similar studies suggesting that cocaine use by pregnant
mothers impairs the intelligence of their children. She says that studies
like Vorhees's in rats are usually a good indicator of what happens in
people. She and a group of British researchers at the University of East
London are planning a follow-up study in pregnant women who take ecstasy.