Maternal Traumatic Stress and Youth Alcohol Use

About This Grant

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The candidate’s long-term goal is to develop a research program focused on how intergenerational trauma contributes to alcohol use in youth, and thereby facilitate the development of improved strategies to prevent alcohol use disorder (AUD) in youth. Through the research and training in this K08 proposal, the PI will acquire training in longitudinal research methods, AUD clinical and neural correlates, and task-evoked functional MRI (fMRI) connectivity. Youth alcohol use is a serious public health problem that is related to family functioning. Maternal history of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may increase youths’ likelihood of alcohol use and later risk for AUD by influencing youth neurobiology. Heightened response to negative emotions is an important predictor of later AUD in youth and is also associated with family history of PTSD. Associations between maternal history of PTSD, youths’ neurodevelopment, and prospective youth alcohol use have been minimally examined. Addressing this gap in knowledge would support the ability to successfully prevent or mitigate the emergence of AUD in offspring of mothers with a history of PTSD. Therefore, the proposed K08 project will address the candidate’s training goals while gathering preliminary and feasibility data supporting the next step in her research. The proposed research study aims to: (1) evaluate differences in alcohol use among youth with or without a maternal history of PTSD, during a 2-year follow-up period; and (2) among these same two groups, evaluate differences in task- based functional connectivity among brain regions involved in emotion response and corresponding behavior. The PI proposes to accomplish these aims by collecting fMRI and report-based data from a sample of 56 youth ages 12-14, and their mothers with histories of trauma exposure. Half of the youth will have a mother with a history of PTSD, and the other half will not have a mother with a history of PTSD. Youth will complete a fMRI paradigm designed to elicit activity in brain regions underlying emotion response. Youth will complete follow-up assessments every 6 months across 2 years. It is anticipated that findings will show the extent to which maternal PTSD is associated with youth alcohol use, and with disruptions in youth emotion response system function as a potential mechanism. This K08 application proposes training and research that is directly in line with NIAAA objectives and represents a logical progression from the PI’s prior experience to address career development goals in three areas: (1) longitudinal participant retention and analytic techniques in alcohol use research; (2) assessment of clinical and neural correlates of AUD; and (3) advanced functional MRI connectivity methods in developmental models of AUD. The experience and findings from the proposed K08 will position the PI to pursue NIH funding and build this line of research through a large developmental study of AUD risk.