The complexity of examining developmental outcomes of children prenatally exposed to opiates. A response to the Hunt et al. Adverse neurodevelopmental outcome of infants exposed to opiates in-utero. Early Human Development (2008, 84, 29-35).

摘要

While the administration of any medication during pregnancy calls for a careful examination of the risk:benefit ratio for both the mother and fetus, the prenatal exposure to methadone has received more scrutiny regarding its short- and longer-term risk:benefit ratios than most other medications. Since the 1970s, research has examined the relationship between prenatal methadone exposure and neurobeha-vioral outcome [1,2] longer-term outcomes [3-7]). Hunt et al. [8] compared the neurodevelopment of "opiate-exposed" to "healthy control" infants at 18 and 36 months of age using data collected from 1979 to 1984. The stated aims of their paper were to "review the published literature which examines neurodevelopment outcomes in infants with NAS and to report developmental follow-up data from a case-control study of babies exposed to opiates in utero."