美国国家公共电台 NPR For Newborns Exposed To Opioids, Health Issues May Be The Least Of Their Problems

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

At a Steubenville, Ohio, hospital the other week, I heard about the expense of running an obstetrics department, including this troubling fact. One newborn in 5 there is born having been exposed in the womb to opioids. That figure certainly shows how pervasive 1 opioid abuse is among young women there of childbearing age. But what does it say about the health and developmental prospects 2 for the babies? Well, from Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the former health commissioner 3 of Baltimore, comes this surprising answer. In terms of physical consequences, it may say a lot less than you think.

Dr. Sharfstein, who is a pediatrician and a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, joins us now. Welcome to the program.

JOSHUA SHARFSTEIN: Thanks for having me.

SIEGEL: So one baby is born having been exposed in utero to heroin 4 or Oxycontin. Another is born not having been exposed. What does that say about what lies ahead for those two babies?

SHARFSTEIN: Well, it's terrible news for the first baby, particularly if there is an addiction 5 in the parents because when parents are addicted 6, the home life is chaotic 7. There's an increased risk of abuse and neglect. And all of those factors conspire 8 against the child. It's really a very difficult start to life.

SIEGEL: But you're not talking about a baby whose nervous system or whose neural 9 development is being greatly damaged by that exposure.

SHARFSTEIN: Right. It's not so much a chemical problem. It's a social problem. When it reflects an addiction, an out-of-control home life, that's the problem. And the reason to put it that way is when we think of solutions, the solutions are to help the parents, to help the mom, particularly, out of her addiction, to get her into effective treatment. And when you do that, then the prospects for the child really improve.

SIEGEL: What is neonatal abstinence syndrome 10?

SHARFSTEIN: It's a collection of symptoms that babies can have as they're withdrawing from the opioids that they were exposed to in utero. Those symptoms can include tremors 11, increased muscle tone, excessive sucking, poor feeding. And what you do is you treat that with an opioid that is slowly weaned off.

SIEGEL: You've cited as precedent 12 for what you say is an alarmist, exaggerated fear of prenatal exposure to opioids the widespread concern in the 1990s about crack babies, what prenatal exposure to cocaine 13 can do to a child. What does the latest research say about babies who were exposed prenatally to cocaine?

SHARFSTEIN: We certainly should learn the lessons of what I would call maybe the crack baby panic. There were magazine covers, newspaper stories. What was happening to the brains of these babies, and would they be permanently 14 scarred? The long-term evidence of that is that it really doesn't look like there's much of anything from cocaine in terms of the chemical impact on the brain.

The real harm is if the baby is going home into an environment that's unsafe. There are all kinds of problems. And the reason this is important is, for crack babies, people sort of saw the mom as the enemy, right? The baby was viewed as separate from the mom, and the mom could get punished and all sorts of things. And when that happened, the baby wound up doing worse. A better way of thinking about it is, what can we do to help the mom? There's nothing more important for the baby than that the mom is healthy.

SIEGEL: It sounds to me that as someone in public health, having been a Baltimore health commissioner, you're concerned about a kind of shaming of the mother here, that that's the wrong way to go.

SHARFSTEIN: Absolutely. And this is the tragedy that just absolutely drove me crazy - is, you'd have a mother who maybe got methadone during pregnancy 15, was actually finally starting to put the pieces of her life back together. And then when the baby comes out a little jittery 16 with the symptoms, she's made to feel horrible. She's told it's 'cause she was on methadone. And then what happens is she goes, well, I'm coming off. And the next thing you know, where she was getting her life back together, she's relapsed, Social Services involved. She lose custody 17 of the baby. The baby is off to a terrible start in life. That's just a terrible outcome. And we have to be able to see this issue of neonatal abstinence syndrome in a little more complexity 18 to be able to prevent those bad outcomes.

SIEGEL: And that story that you just related to me - that's not a rare hypothetical from your experience in Baltimore.

SHARFSTEIN: Absolutely not. Actually, my wife is an addiction medicine doctor, so some of these people wind up her patients.

SIEGEL: Well, Dr. Sharfstein, thank you very much for talking with us today.

SHARFSTEIN: My pleasure.

SIEGEL: That's Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, who's a pediatrician and professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He used to be health commissioner of Baltimore, Md.