Researchers at the University of Kentucky have released their findings in a study dealing with the opioid crisis: what happens to the cardiovascular health of babies exposed to opioids in the womb?
The new study suggests that children born to mothers who use opioids during pregnancy may be more likely to develop chronic diseases as adults, including cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Researchers presented their work over the weekend at the American Physiology Summit, the annual meeting of the American Physiological Society, in Long Beach, California.
The use and misuse of opioids during pregnancy has grown rapidly over the past decade. On average, about one baby born every 15 minutes in the U.S. is diagnosed with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS), stemming from opioid use during pregnancy.
Although the symptoms of NOWS are usually treatable in babies, scientists have known little about the potential long-term health impacts of in-utero opioid exposure once these children grow up.
“It is challenging to predict the long-term impact on the cardiovascular health of children from women with opioid misuse and opioid overdoses due to the lack of follow-ups after discharge,” said Analia Loria, senior study author and an associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Nutritional Sciences at UK’s College of Medicine. “However, our studies provide insights regarding how opioids could affect the programming of the mechanisms regulating cardiovascular function and increase the cardiovascular risk.”
The researchers developed a rat model that mimics the use of drugs during pregnancy and studied what happens to the offspring from birth until adulthood. They found that babies of mothers who used drugs while pregnant were shorter at birth and weighed less during the breastfeeding stage compared to nondrug-exposed babies.
However, when they started eating independently, the drug-exposed babies gained weight quickly and caught up to their nonexposed peers, a pattern that can increase the risk of cardiovascular and metabolic disease.
As adults, rats exposed to drugs in the womb had higher blood pressure, poorer blood sugar control and increased levels of bad cholesterol despite having the same diet as the nondrug-exposed rats. The researchers also saw differences in regulating how the brain responds to drugs, raising the possibility that people exposed to opioids in the womb may face a higher risk of drug dependence later in life.
The full study is in the American Heart Association’s journal Hypertension online here.
By Tom Latek, Kentucky Today
