Opioid abuse and misuse have increased greatly over the last decades across the adult population, including pregnant women. When a child is born to an opioid dependent mother, the exposure to opioids is suddenly terminated, leading to debilitating neonatal opioid withdrawal. This poses severe risks for the infant, where they experience debilitating withdrawal symptoms like irritability, tremors, feeding intolerance, seizures, and respiratory distress. On top of this, the high degree of central nervous system plasticity directly after birth ensures withdrawal can affect long-lasting changes in the somatosensory circuit, responsible for touch and pain processing and effectiveness of analgesics. Using a novel model of neonatal opioid withdrawal in C57BL6\J mice, we were the first to show differential brainstem activation following withdrawal, and a unique profile of long-term consequences. In this presentation, Dr. van den Hoogen will take the participants through preclinical research into neonatal opioid withdrawal and its acute and long-term effects. Recent insights from her postdoctoral work at the University of Calgary will be shared, looking into the acute mechanism of neonatal opioid withdrawal, as well as novel insights into long-term consequences of opioid withdrawal in early life on pain behaviour and neurodevelopment of the somatosensory system.