Nucleus-nucleus collisions offer a great opportunity for analyzing and determining the intrinsic nature of heavy and exotic hadrons.
In this sense, here we discuss how the production and dissociation of hadron states are affected by reactions during the expansion of hadronic matter in a heavy-ion collision environment. We give emphasis to recent works on exotic states, revisiting as a case study the time evolution of the abundances of the $X_{0,1}(2900)$ states.