The percentage of infants born with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) was nearly twice as high in 2012 as it was 2011, report Dr. S. W. Patrick and coauthors from the department of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University.
In a retrospective, serial, cross-sectional analysis, NAS occurred in 5.8 per 1,000 hospital births in 2012, compared with 3.4 per 1,000 hospital births in 2009. Aggregate hospital charges for NAS also increased significantly, from $732 million to $1.5 billion (P < .001), the investigators found.
Additionally, infants diagnosed with NAS were more likely than infants without NAS to have complications including low birth weight, transient tachypnea, jaundice, feeding difficulty, respiratory distress syndrome, and sepsis, Dr. Patrick and colleagues reported.
“NAS results in longer, more costly and complicated hospital stays, compared with other hospital births,” the investigators wrote in the paper. “The rapid rise in NAS parallels the increase in [opioid pain reliever] use in the United States, suggesting that preventing opioid overuse and misuse, especially before pregnancy, may prevent NAS.”
Read the full study in Journal of Perinatology (doi:10.1038/jp.2015.36).