Recent advances in the field of magnetic resonance (MR) based neuroimaging have greatly improved our understanding of alterations in brain structure, function and metabolism resulting from prenatal exposure to licit and illicit drugs of abuse. This in turn has aided researchers in identifying potential hypotheses explaining brain-behavior relationships underlying the prenatal drug-exposed phenotype, and has also conferred unique opportunities to examine in detail the structural, metabolic and functional consequences of prenatal drug exposure in vivo. One of the great advantages of these neuroimaging methods is that they are safe and non-invasive, which enables repeated studies in single individuals including infants and children, making them ideal tools for monitoring longitudinal brain development in this population.
