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To treat NAS, use mother‐infant bond; results include reduced use of morphine, length of stay, and costs
Author(s) -
Knopf Alison
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
the brown university child and adolescent behavior letter
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1556-7575
pISSN - 1058-1073
DOI - 10.1002/cbl.30223
Subject(s) - methadone , medicine , neonatal intensive care unit , morphine , pediatrics , in utero , emergency medicine , pregnancy , anesthesia , fetus , biology , genetics
Infants born to mothers who are in treatment for opioid use disorders with methadone are sometimes born with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), a constellation of symptoms associated with opioid withdrawal. The old way of treating these infants — and the current way in many institutions — is to put them in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and treat them with gradually decreasing doses of morphine. But keep out of the NICU, standardize nonpharmacologic care, and empower parents, and what do you get? A reduction in the percentage of infants treated with morphine from 98% to 14%, a reduction in average length of stay (ALOS) from 22.4 to 5.9 days, and a decrease in costs from $44,824 to $10,289. That is what researchers at Yale New Haven Children's Hospital discovered when they implemented novel “plan‐do‐study‐act” cycles in 2010 in response to a dramatic increase in the number of infants born there who had been exposed to methadone in utero (a 74% increase from 2003 to 2009).