JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. – Members of the Junior League of Johnson City recently awarded $20,000 to East Tennessee State University’s Center for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment for the creation of a Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS) database.
NAS is defined as a condition in which a baby has withdrawal symptoms after being exposed to addictive illegal or prescription drugs while in the mother’s womb. When the baby is born, it goes through withdrawal because it is no longer receiving the substances.
“There are currently no studies demonstrating long-term outcomes for NAS babies,” said Angie Hagaman, program director for the National Institute on Drug Abuse/Diversity-Promoting Institutions Drug Abuse Research Program housed in ETSU’s College of Public Health. “The creation of a NAS database will have a significant impact on NAS moms and babies here and, likely, across the country.”
Researchers at ETSU will extract retrospective data from previous NAS cases – without any patient identifiers – and begin collecting data from current NAS cases moving forward.
“We’ll be looking at 80-some variables from the type of drugs used and where the mother got prenatal care to any services involved in treating the children,” Hagaman said. “By analyzing the data, we can immediately treat these babies more effectively.”
The goal is to better understand what worked in treating the infants as well as problems these children may begin to encounter in later years.
Formal partnerships are being developed with regional health care systems, including Mountain States Health Alliance and Mission Health System.
Ginny Wright, president of the Junior League of Johnson City, said organization members spent a year searching for a partnership in which they believed they could make “a true community impact.”
“For us, this was the perfect fit,” Wright said. “We want to see the start of the registry and we want to see the registry over time create best practices around what really works in solving the issue of NAS. We think this donation can create change.”
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 21,732 babies in the United States were born with NAS in 2012, a five-fold increase since 2000. The national incidence of NAS in 2012 was 5.8 per 1,000 live births and Tennessee’s rate during the same year was nearly twice that rate at 11 per 1,000 live births.
Currently, East Tennessee is experiencing some of the highest NAS rates in the nation, with Sullivan County at 49.1 cases per 1,000 and the Northeast Region at 42.7 per 1,000. Due to the overwhelming amount of care NAS babies require and the growing number of NAS babies being born each year, some health care systems are creating special wings in their hospitals focused solely on NAS patients.
“NAS is a heartbreaking and costly problem,” Hagaman said. “We are creating this database so we can help improve treatment outcomes and prevent future incidence of NAS.”