The number of babies born addicted to the class of drugs that includes prescription painkillers has nearly tripled in the past decade, according to the first national study of its kind.
About 3.4 of every 1,000 infants born in a hospital in 2009 suffered from a type of drug withdrawal commonly seen in the babies of pregnant women who abuse narcotic pain medications, the study says. It's published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
That's about 13,539 infants a year, or one born every hour, says the study's lead author, Stephen Patrick, a fellow in neonatal-perinatal medicine at the University of Michigan.
Treating those newborns, most of them covered by the publicly financed Medicaid program, cost $720 million in 2009, the study says.
The country has an obligation to help these babies, who are "the most vulnerable and the most blameless" members of society, says Marie Hayes, a psychology professor at the University of Maine who was not involved in the study.
Unlike in the 1980s and 1990s, when hospitals saw a surge in babies born addicted to crack cocaine, many newborns today arrive hooked on powerful prescription painkillers, such as Vicodin and Oxycontin, Patrick says. The type of withdrawal he studied, neonatal abstinence syndrome, produces different symptoms from cocaine. The syndrome also can be caused by illegal opiates, such as heroin, he says, but the surge likely is a result of an "epidemic" of prescription-drug abuse.
The number of pregnant women who used or abused any kind of opiate rose fivefold from 2000 to 2009, he found, and now account for 5.6 of 1,000 hospital births a year. Findings also were presented at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Boston.
Andreea Creanga, a researcher with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says about 4.5% of pregnant women use illegal drugs.
The CDC has flagged prescription painkiller abuse as a major health threat, noting that the drugs now cause more overdose deaths than heroin and cocaine combined. And the problem is getting worse. The death rate from overdoses in 2007 -- 12 deaths per 100,000 people -- was three times higher than in 1991, the CDC says. Most of that came from prescription drugs.
Many mothers tell doctors they didn't realize prescription painkillers could harm their babies, says Mark Hudak, a spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Others are addicted when they get pregnant and are unable to quit, he says.
Babies born in withdrawal are often born small and are at a higher risk of death, Patrick says. Doctors treat them with methadone, a narcotic used to treat heroin addicts. The dose is cut slowly to avoid withdrawal symptoms, he says.
Doctors and nurses sometimes can tell which babies are going through withdrawal simply from their cries, Patrick says. They are irritable and hard to console, with stiff, rigid muscles. They have tremors, seizures and breathing problems. They have trouble feeding, throw up frequently and produce watery diarrhea.
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