Many Doctors Give Morphine to Babies Born With Opioid Addiction. A New Study Suggests There ’s a Better Way

As the opioid crisis continues, an estimated one baby is born every 20 minutes to a mother who is addicted to the painkilling drugs. But doctors have few proven ways to treat those infants who become dependent on opioids in utero and are born in withdrawal from the drugs. “Despite the fact that we have seen increases in NAS in recent years, there is still significant uncertainty about who to treat, when to treat and what agents to use,” says Dr. Jonathan Davis, vice chair of pediatrics at Tufts Medical Center. “And then there are questions about how fast to increase the dose, and how fast to take the babies off the medications. In the first study to directly compare two of the most common treatment methods — methadone and morphine — researchers hope to establish a uniform strategy for treating neonatal abstinence syndrome, or NAS. In the U.S., says Davis, about 80% of NAS cases are treated with morphine, and 20% with methadone, which is also a narcotic but comes with less of the potentially addictive high that opioid painkillers like morphine and oxycodone carry. MORE: Most People Who Misuse Opioids Don’t Have a Prescription In the study, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, Davis looked at mothers who were in treatment for opioid addiction, and taking medications like buprenorphine or methadone to help in their addiction recovery. He found that among the 116 babies born with NAS who were followed for about a month, those randomly assigned...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthytime medicine onetime Source Type: news