Genetics of childhood disorders: LV. Prenatal drug exposure.

The topic of the reviews in this series will be prenatal exposure to drugs such as cocaine and alcohol and their effects on neural ontogeny and associated neurocognitive/neurobehavioral development in offspring. Exposure to drugs prenatally, surely an important concern for practitioners, is part of the broader field of behavioral teratology or the study of perinatal developmental injury and of the factors—including drug and toxin exposure, parental disease or impairment, and birth accidents—that increase the risk of immediate or later physical injury or developmental impairment. Some of the earliest questions in this field were about the effects of maternal malnutrition and of irradiation on fetal and infant neurodevelopmental outcome, and the most contemporary questions are about the impact of maternal stress and anxiety on long-term infant and child neurodevelopment. Questions regarding the impact of exposures to exogenous agents or events during specific developmental phases are implicit in nearly every consideration of a psychiatric disorder or the manifestations of that disorder across development. The field of behavioral teratology has grown far past a strictly behavioral emphasis to include functional neuroimaging, neurophysiology, neurochemistry, and neuropsychology. Indeed, interest in developmental injury from a psychological/behavioral point of view has facilitated progress in understanding the normal or expectable features of neural development and early perceptual, social-emotional, and cognitive processes.