The epidemic of overuse of prescription narcotic pills may be landing as many as 15,000 newborns in the intensive care unit at an annual cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the healthcare system, according to a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“Clearly it’s a pretty dramatic problem,” says Dr. Alan Spitzer, senior author of the study and a senior vice president at
Moreover, Spitzer says, the problem isn't just the people are abusing the pills, but instead that they are being prescribed to pregnant mothers. “Having discussed this with many of our physicians as well as some parents I think they’ve been led to believe that if they have aches and pains, and they take these medications, it’s perfectly safe. And it’s not.”
Researchers at Pediatrix, a unit of Mednax, looked at records of opioid drug withdrawal, known as neonatal abstinence syndrome, in 299 neonatal intensive care units that use the company’s electronic health record. Among 674,845 infants who were treated there, 10,327 suffered from drug withdrawal between 2003 and 2013.
During that decade, the rate of drug withdrawal quadrupled from 7 cases per 1,000 NICU admissions to 27 cases per 1,000 NICU admissions, and the percentage of all the days any babies spent in the NICU that were attributable to drug withdrawal increased 7 fold from 0.6% of total days to 4% of all days. At some NICUs, 20% of infants there on any given day were there because of drug withdrawal.
Those numbers are straight from the New England Journal paper. The next figures are not; they are just back-of-the-envelope calculations. But I think they give a better sense of the scale of this problem.
There are about 550,000 infants who are admitted to the NICU every year in the U.S. If 27 out of every 1,000 are enrolled because of drug withdrawal, that would be nearly 15,000 babies admitted the hospital, Spitzer says. It can cost as much as $3,000 per day to take care of a baby in the NICU, and these babies, on average, stay there for 19 days. That would mean these admissions could cost as much as $855 million dollars a year.
The number of deaths annually in the U.S. attributed at least in part to prescription narcotic pain pill overdoses has increased from 4,000 in 1999 to 16,000 in 2013, although growth has been tempered in recent years. These include Vicodin, Percoset and Oxycontin, as well as newer abuse resistant forms like Hysingla, Targineq ER, and Embeda, which are aimed at being more difficult to overdose on.
Purdue, which manufactures Oxycontin, Hysingla, and Tagineq, and
The results are also being presented at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in San Diego, Calif.
