TRANSGENERATIONAL CONSIDERATIONS IN ADDICTIONS (LC MAYES AND E MCCRORY, SECTION EDITORS) Exploring the Relationship Between Childhood Maltreatment and Addiction: A Review of the Neurocognitive Evidence

# The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Childhood maltreatment has been shown to in-crease the risk of a range of psychiatric disorders including substance use disorders (SUDs) and is associated with the onset, course and severity of illness. We review the evidence for alterations in brain structure and neurocognitive process-ing in individuals who have experienced childhood maltreat-ment, focusing specifically on changes related to reward pro-cessing, executive functioning and affect processing. Changes in these neurocognitive systems have been documented in adults presenting with SUDs, who are typically characterized by heightened subcortico-striatal responses to salient stimuli and impairments in fronto-cingulate regulation. Maltreatment-specific effects in these processing domains may account for the particularly severe clinical presentation of SUDs in adults with histories of maltreatment in childhood. The findings are considered in relation to the theory of latent vulnerability, which contends that alterations in these neurocognitive sys-tems may reflect calibration to early risk environments that in turn increases the risk of developing of SUDs later in life