Study: Quiet and parents’ touch help opioid users’ newborns
Babies born to opioid users had shorter hospital stays and needed less medication when their care emphasized parent involvement, skin-to-skin contact and a quiet environment, researchers recently reported.
Newborns were ready to go home about a week earlier compared with those getting standard care. Fewer received opioid medications to reduce withdrawal symptoms such as tremors and hard-to-soothe crying, about 20% compared to 52% of the standard-care babies.
Babies born to opioid users, including mothers in treatment with medications such as methadone, can develop withdrawal symptoms after exposure in the womb.
Typically, hospitals use a scoring system to decide which babies need medicine to ease withdrawal, which means treatment in newborn intensive care units.
“The mom is sitting there anxiously waiting for the score,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Leslie Young of the University of Vermont’s children’s hospital. “This would be really stressful for families.”
In the new approach, nurses involve mothers as they evaluate together whether rocking, breastfeeding or swaddling can calm the baby, Young said. Medicine is an option, but the environment is considered, too.
“Is the TV on in the room? Do we need to turn that off? Are the lights on? Do we need to turn those down?” Young said.
About 5,000 nurses were trained during the study, published by the New England Journal of Medicine.
Researchers studied the care of 1,300 newborns at 26 U.S. hospitals. Babies born before training were compared with babies born after.
The National Institutes of Health funded the work as part of an initiative to address the U.S. opioid addiction crisis.
Researchers followed the babies for three months and found no difference in urgent care or emergency room visits or hospitalizations — reassuring evidence about the safety of shorter hospital stays. Scientists will follow the babies until age 2 to monitor health.