This story is first in our four-part series Treating the Tiniest Opioid Patients, a collaboration produced by NPR's National & Science Desks, local member stations and Kaiser Health News.
Swaddled in soft hospital blankets, Lexi is 2 weeks old and weighs 6 pounds. She's been at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, R.I., since she was born, and is experiencing symptoms of opioid withdrawal. Her mother took methadone to wean herself from heroin when she got pregnant, just as doctors advised. But now the hospital team has to wean newborn Lexi from the methadone.
As rates of opioid addiction have continued to climb in the U.S., the number of babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome has gone up, too ā by five-fold from 2000 to 2012, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
It can be a painful way to enter the world, abruptly cut off from the powerful drug in the mother's system. The baby is usually born with some level of circulating opioids. As drug levels decline in the first 72 hours, various withdrawal symptoms may appear ā such as trembling, vomiting, diarrhea or seizures.
[For more of this story, written by Kristin Gourlay, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...elp-easing-into-life]
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