Hospital stays for infants experiencing opioid withdrawal after exposure to the narcotics in utero can be greatly reduced by treatment with buprenorphine, according to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The current standard of care for infants born with neonatal abstinence syndrome is to be treated with morphine and then slowly weaned off the potent medication over the course of approximately one month. Due to the difficulty associated with studying pediatric populations, the evidence supporting this practice is limited.
To assess the potential efficacy of treating newborns with NAS with buprenorphine — a long-acting opioid often used to curb addiction among opioid addicts — researchers enrolled 63 infants with NAS and placed them into one of two treatment arms. Thirty of the enrollees were treated with morphine and 33 were treated with buprenorphine. While infants treated with morphine required the medication for 28 days before their withdrawal symptoms subsided, the infants treated with buprenorphine only needed the medication for 15 days, reducing treatment time by 47 percent. Both treatments were determined to be comparable in terms of safety.
"The beauty of our results is that the drug is immediately readily available, unequivocally effective, non-invasive and safe. This could impact standard of care for and the financial cost of neonatal abstinence syndrome," said Michelle Ehrlich, MD, a professor of pediatrics and neurology at The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and one of the study's authors.
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