Arkansas Children’s Research Institute Awarded More Than $516,000 from NIH to Participate in Wide-Ranging Initiative to Address Addiction to Opioids and Other Substances

LITTLE ROCK, AR. (Nov. 6, 2019) – Arkansas Children’s Research Institute (ACRI) is participating in a wide-ranging initiative to address addiction after the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded two of its researchers $516,375 to study how prenatal exposure to opioids and other drugs affects children’s brain development.

Since 2000, the number of pregnant women with opioid use disorders has increased four-fold and the incidence of neonatal abstinence syndrome has increased five-fold, according to NIH.

The 18-month Phase 1 planning grant awarded to ACRI will help lay the foundation for a major component of NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative, the HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study.

Working closely with NIH and 27 other sites across the nation, the research at ACRI will help prepare for the Phase 2 national HBCD study, which aims to enroll and follow thousands of children from before birth through age 9-10 to examine how brain development and children’s cognitive function and behavior are influenced by prenatal opioid and other drug exposure, childhood trauma and adversity and other environmental factors.

In Arkansas, the work will be led by ACRI investigators Xiawei Ou, PhD, an associate professor of radiology and pediatrics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) College of Medicine, and Ashley Acheson, PhD, an associate professor of psychiatry at UAMS.

“The knowledge we’ll gain from these projects will inform the next steps for what can be done to help these children,” Acheson said. “We see this as having the potential to lead to interventions to help improve their outcomes.”

“To solve a problem like negative changes in children’s brain development and adverse outcomes associated with opioid addiction during pregnancy, you have to first really understand the problem,” Ou said. “We believe over the next 18 months we will develop a solid strategy to look into this problem, and hopefully during phase 2 of this study we’ll know much more about what exactly happens and why it happens, which will lead to strategies that help us provide better care.”

For this Phase 1 project, ACRI is part of a consortium that includes Duke University, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The research teams of this particular consortium will develop approaches and strategies, conduct pilot studies using fetal and postnatal imaging, evaluate instruments that can help assess children’s behavior and neurodevelopment and analyze available data to guide a Phase II study design.

The ACRI award, worth a combined $516,375, is among 375 grant awards across 41 states made by NIH in fiscal year 2019 to apply scientific solutions to reverse the national opioid crisis. NIH is funding $945 million in an unprecedented commitment to addressing the crisis.

This research is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R34DA050261.

The ACRI research team includes:

• Jessica Coker, MD, an assistant professor of psychiatry and obstetrics and gynecology at the UAMS College of Medicine;
• Leanne Whiteside-Mansell, EdD, a professor of family and preventive medicine at the UAMS College of Medicine;
• Lorraine McKelvey, PhD, an associate professor of family and preventive medicine and pediatrics at the UAMS College of Medicine;
• Whit Hall, MD, a professor of pediatrics at the UAMS College of Medicine;
• Charles Glasier, MD, a professor of radiology and pediatrics at the UAMS College of Medicine.