Study Finds Differences In Kids Brains May Lead To Drug Use, Not The Other Way Around
And the differences could present an easy early intervention.
If you were a certain kind of kid going through the D.A.R.E. program in the ’90s, you very likely lived a good chunk of your childhood believing you were one peer-pressured joint away from a crack addiction and living on the streets. But even after those sensational fears ultimately ebbed (and for most of us they did), the idea of “gateway drugs” changing our brains and increasing the odds of addiction remained.
But a December 2024 study, recently covered in Scientific American, suggests that it’s differences in the brain that cause drug use and not the other way around.
The study examined the brain structures of more than 9,800 children enrolled in the ongoing Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. These participants have brain scans done every three years starting between the ages of 9 and 11. For this study, researchers conducted annual in-person as well as midyear phone interviews to assess substance use. Among those who experimented with cannabis, alcohol, and/or tobacco before the age of 15, “the majority of brain structure features associated with substance use initiation were evident among substance-naive children at baseline who later initiated.”
In other words: the brains of children who tried drugs early were already different before they tried drugs in the first place. As such, these structural differences — enlargement in key areas of the brain — may help predict pre-dispositional risk for trying drugs.
Scientific American notes that brain differences found in this study have been associated with personality traits like curiosity and impulsivity or risk-taking. Educational programs and workshops targeted to such children, they add, have been remarkably successful in reducing levels of drug abuse within the targeted cohort.
But it is important to note that this study does not say anything about drug addiction, but rather drug use, which could include something as minimal as sipping alcohol.
Still, recognizing that there may be physiological differences in brains that predisposition a person to experiment with drugs is no small thing, and can help us understand, and safeguard, against such behaviors.
