Project Details
Description
The accelerating U.S. opioid crisis requires urgent scientific and public health action. Maternal perinatal use/abuse is particularly deleterious due to its reverberating intergenerational impact. Though prenatal exposure to opioids and other substances have adverse effects on neurodevelopment, advances in neuroimaging and developmentally-sensitive phenotypic measurement now enable characterization of typical and atypical brain-behavior pathways on an unprecedented scale. Mechanistic study that traces the multi-level determinants and patterns of risk and resilience from the prenatal period through childhood requires a large, national cohort that accounts for regional and racial/ethnic variation. We propose the Brains Begin Before Birth (B4) Midwest Consortium, a partnership of neuroscience, substance use, perinatal mental health, and child welfare scientists at Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM) and neuroscience, bioethics, pediatric population health, maternal-fetal and addiction scientists at Northwestern University (NU). Along with scientific complementarity, a strength of this regional consortium is its ability to leverage the contrasting approaches of Illinois (punitive) and Missouri (non-punitive) to prenatal opioid use, providing an exceptional platform for examining the impact of jurisdictional variations on science and practice. Together we provide a framework for addressing three major areas of challenge key to a high-quality, representative, national multi-site study: (1) Legal/Ethical: Led by NU bioethics and population health experts, we propose a mixed methods approach to delineating barriers and generating solutions to scientific engagement of opioid using pregnant women from varied jurisdictions; (2) Recruitment/Retention: Led by NU experts in behavioral economics approaches to research participation and WUSM experts in care coordination, child welfare and mobile technology, we use innovative methods to test differential effectiveness of
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 9/30/19 → 9/30/22 |
Funding
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (1R34DA050266-01 REVISED)
Fingerprint
Explore the research topics touched on by this project. These labels are generated based on the underlying awards/grants. Together they form a unique fingerprint.