fMRI shows neurological connection between opioid addiction, parental neglect

When videos of parents overdosing around their children went viral last month the general public responded with a mixture of outrage and sadness. While there's general pattern of neglect with addicted parents, a neurological basis may be partly responsible for such actions. 

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used fMRI to measure activation of the brain's reward pathway when viewing pictures of infants. The catch? Some pictures that exaggerated infantile features such as large eyes and a small lower jaw, while other images had those features diminshed. Known as the baby schema, these features enhance motivation for caretaking in normal individuals. However, opioid addicted individuals had diminshed responses to the modified pictures when compared to the control subjects. 

When the addicted subjects were given doses of an opiid inhibitor, their neurological responses to the pictures returned to near baseline levels. This study is one of the first to correlate opioid addiction and social cognition, although the current opioid epidemic in the U.S. guarantees that there will be more studies to follow. 

Read more about the implications of these findings at the link below.