Exploring how prenatal alcohol and stress affect rhesus monkey offspring in adulthood

New in JNeurosci, Mary Schneider and Alexander Converse, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led an interdisciplinary study to explore how prenatal alcohol and stress exposure affect rhesus monkey offspring in adulthood. 

Pregnant rhesus monkeys either drank moderate amounts of alcohol, experienced mild stress, or both. The researchers later assessed changes to the brain's dopamine system and alcohol drinking in adult offspring. Prenatal stress and alcohol influenced the dopamine system of offspring, and the prenatal alcohol exposure group drank alcohol faster in adulthood. Measures of the dopamine system in offspring before they drank predicted their drinking behavior, supporting findings from human studies of alcohol use disorder. Thus, according to the researchers, brain differences may exist before those with alcohol use disorders begin drinking. 

As offspring in this study drank alcohol, they experienced additional changes to the dopamine system that affected how much they drank and varied on an individual basis. The researchers theorize that this could mean there are individualized neuroadaptive responses to drinking that promote the transition from normal drinking to alcohol use disorder. 

According to the researchers, their work supports the idea that drinking while pregnant isn't a good idea by linking this behavior to maladaptive drinking in adult offspring. Furthermore, while this work did not find a link between prenatal stress and offspring drinking behavior, the authors suggest that it is possible that prenatal stress has implications for other behaviors. The researchers also emphasize that their experimental approach closely models prenatal stress and alcohol exposure in humans, making this work more relevant clinically.