More babies born addicted to opiates

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Some Ohio hospitals have seen more than a four-fold increase in the number of newborns hooked on painkillers amid the nation’s prescription drug abuse epidemic, resulting in longer hospital stays for the affected babies and higher public health care costs, medical experts said.

Few Dayton-area hospitals are tracking the problem, but local doctors said they are seeing a steady number of newborns who have been exposed to drugs such as OxyContin and Vicodin.

Dr. John Wispe, a professor of pediatrics at the Ohio State University College of Medicine and the university’s hospital, said this is the fourth iteration of addicted newborns he has seen in his 30-year career.

“When I started, it was all heroin; then we went to crack cocaine, then we went to methamphetamines and now we are on to prescription opiates,” he said.

Prescription drug abuse is the nation’s fastest-growing drug problem, according to the office of National Drug Control Policy. It has been classified as an epidemic by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We definitely see an increased number of patients who come to us early in their pregnancy that are on pain medicine for whatever reason, and patients just demanding that they continue it despite them knowing it is going to be addicting to their baby,” said Dr. Stephen Guy, who practices obstetrics and gynecology at Miami Valley Hospital.

About 4 percent of the 2,000 babies delivered annually at Southview Medical Center in Washington Twp. involve “a mom who is taking some type of illicit drug, whether it’s a street drug or it is a misuse of a prescription medication,” said Dr. Wendy Luce, the hospital’s head of neonatology. That number is in line with the national average of 3 to 5 percent, she said.

Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus treated 80 opiate-addicted newborns in 2010, up more than 400 percent from 15 newborns in 2005, Wispe said.

“The number of babies across the country who have been diagnosed with this issue over the past 10 years has gone up by a factor of four or five,” said Dr. Mark Hudak, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida College of Medicine. Hudak served this year on an American Academy of Pediatrics committee to revise treatment guidelines for babies suffering from withdrawal.

Symptoms typically appear within four days after birth and can include excessive crying, sweating, tremors and diarrhea. Drug-exposed babies require intensive nursing care and can remain in the hospital for 21 days or more if they need treatment to wean them off narcotics. A normal healthy baby typically goes home within 24 to 72 hours.

Costs vary by hospital, but 21 days at Nationwide Children’s with a $1,200 daily bed charge is an expense of more than $25,000.

“By and large we don’t get paid for these babies,” because many of the moms don’t have insurance or are on Medicaid,” Wispe said.

The mothers of drug-exposed babies usually are referred to hospital social workers or county social service agencies for help finding treatment programs. “If we can find them in pregnancy and they are using drugs and we help get them into a treatment program, those babies tend to do better,” Luce said.

The impact of the drugs on a child’s development can be difficult to determine because of other risk factors such as nutrition and prenatal care. There has been little long-term research on children exposed to prescription painkillers. However, most children exposed to heroin, an opiate similar to OxyContin, eventually catch up to their peers.