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 | | Subject: News from Utah: Pain pills pose pregnancy problems Sun 01 May 2011, 2:23 pm | |
| Utah’s problem with prescription pain pills has hit the maternity ward, with more babies being born hooked on narcotics.
Nearly 5 percent of Utah mothers used opiates — mostly pain pills — during pregnancy last year. And compared to a healthy baby, it costs six times more to treat a newborn born dependent on the drugs, according to research scheduled to be presented Sunday at the Pediatric Academic Societies conference in Denver.
"We have a problem with prescription pain meds in this state, and this is how it spills down to sub-populations of the pregnant women" and their babies, said Karen Buchi, chief of the University of Utah’s division of general pediatrics and one of the authors of the research.
Utah has one of the nation’s highest rates of nonmedical use of pain relievers. And the number of prescription drug overdose deaths reached 310 in 2009.
Last year, researchers tested umbilical cord samples from 850 deliveries at 13 hospitals in Utah, finding that 4.7 percent tested positive for narcotics.
Fifty-eight samples were positive for one or more substances, with 40 positive for opiates that could have included heroin. But most of the drugs were prescription pain pills. That’s more than the number of women who used alcohol, amphetamines, cocaine, marijuana and other drugs combined.
Researchers don’t know if the babies born to the 1 in 20 pregnant women who used opiates were affected. Nor is it known if they were using the drugs as prescribed — for fibromyalgia or pregnancy-related back pain, for example — or if they were using them illegally, Buchi said.
But she noted that few of the drugs would have been given for labor and delivery pain.
Source:
Article by:
Heather May
The Salt Lake Tribune (see link below)
Salt Lake Tribune | |
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