Omaha’s Child Health Research Institute helping treat opioid-exposed infants

OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) - If it takes a village to raise a child, then it could be said a village can heal a child.

In Omaha, the village includes UNMC and Children’s Hospital and Medical Center working together as the Child Health Research Institute on a national study to craft a standard of care for the growing number of infants suffering opioid withdrawal.

The Eating, Sleeping and Consoling for Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal (ESC-NOW) study enrolled 1,305 infants across 26 states and was published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“This is a really big deal and it is just amazing that we were involved in this network so that Nebraska families could be represented,” CHRI Executive Director Ann Anderson Berry, MD, Ph.D. said. Anderson Berry is vice chair of research for the University of Nebraska Medical Center Department of Pediatrics.

”That’s not often the case in these big multi-center trials, and that’s part of why we have the Child Health Research Institute here with UNMC and Children’s is to lift up our patients and our families.”

In the U.S., at least one newborn is born with Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome (NOWS) every 24 minutes.

NOW symptoms include tremors and excessive crying - and can lead to severe long-term risks...

“We studied an intervention called ‘eating, sleeping and consoling’ where we empower families to be the medicine for their babies,” she said. “We teach mothers to follow their instincts, to feed their babies on demand, to hold their babies when they’re having withdrawal symptoms.. and to use those skills in the place of a very medicinalized intervention that we were doing before.”

Infants in the study were ready to go home almost one week early, and are about 63 % less likely to need opioid medication during treatment.

Dr. Anderson Barry said we shouldn’t point fingers; this is about the health of babies and families.

”These are sick moms, they’re moms with chronic medical conditions, whose pregnancies did not go as expected, maybe they had a bad car crash or a bad injury, or we also have a fentanyl and opioid crisis in the United States.”

She said this heart-to-heart and skin-to-skin approach is already being taught to nurses and families at hospitals and medical centers in Nebraska.

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