Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS) occurs in newborns and develops prenatally when the mother participates in opioid abuse during pregnancy1. After birth, the child is also dependent on the drug and suffers from withdrawals. The implications of NAS are both short term and long term in the offspring’s life, ranging from light sensitivity to birth defects. The primary method of treating this syndrome is delivering doses of methadone or morphine into the neonate’s system allowing the newborn to ween off the drug. However, in recent research breast feeding the child while the baby receives regular doses of methadone or morphine has lessened the recovery time for the newborn, and provides a multitude of health benefits for the mother and child.
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Essentially, the illness itself is the dependency the child has on the drug and the side effects that accompany this. Such repercussions of this syndrome on the child are weight loss, seizures, irritability, and vomiting. These side effect leave the already underdeveloped baby with serious complications like: low weight, jaundice, and eating problems. Another problem is that the neonate is incredibly sensitive and must remain hospitalized. This separation from the mother deprives the child of the necessary bonding between a mother and her offspring, and can cause the child to lack in social skills. As of right now, the standard treatment for NAS newborns, opioid maintenance treatment (OMT), does not involve breastfeeding in the therapy. It solely focuses on a medical approach by delivering daily does of either methadone or morphine to the child. These drugs are used to help the newborn through withdrawal and eventually rid the child of it’s dependence. The chemical structures of these two drugs can be seen in Figure 1 and Figure 2. OMT has proven to be effective, however, it separates the child and mother for an extensive period of time and does not supply a method that reinforces this
Essentially, the illness itself is the dependency the child has on the drug and the side effects that accompany this. Such repercussions of this syndrome on the child are weight loss, seizures, irritability, and vomiting. These side effect leave the already underdeveloped baby with serious complications like: low weight, jaundice, and eating problems. Another problem is that the neonate is incredibly sensitive and must remain hospitalized. This separation from the mother deprives the child of the necessary bonding between a mother and her offspring, and can cause the child to lack in social skills. As of right now, the standard treatment for NAS newborns, opioid maintenance treatment (OMT), does not involve breastfeeding in the therapy. It solely focuses on a medical approach by delivering daily does of either methadone or morphine to the child. These drugs are used to help the newborn through withdrawal and eventually rid the child of it’s dependence. The chemical structures of these two drugs can be seen in Figure 1 and Figure 2. OMT has proven to be effective, however, it separates the child and mother for an extensive period of time and does not supply a method that reinforces this