“The number of babies born hooked on their mothers’ opioids has been soaring for almost two decades, yet experts still are not sure whether morphine or methadone is best to gradually break the infants’ drug dependence.
A rigorous new government-funded study has found that methadone has a slight advantage over morphine, modestly reducing babies’ length of treatment and hospitalization.
But the study, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, further complicates the question of how to safely and effectively treat babies going through withdrawal, called neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). At the behest of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the researchers spent a year developing a methadone formulation that could be custom-prepared at each of the eight participating hospitals. This was done to avoid using commercial methadone solutions, which are not approved for pediatric use and contain alcohol as a preservative.”
Source: Philly.com – June 18, 2018
