What the Latest Neuroscience Research Says About Opioids
Researchers trying to come to grips with the full extent of damage caused by opioids are now finding the drugs may even cause harm to the developing brains of infants who are born critically ill and receive repeated anesthesia and long sedation as part of life-saving surgery.
Dr. Dusica Bajic, a principal investigator at Boston Children's Hospital in the department of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine, presented findings at the Society of Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C., showing that children receiving such prolonged sedation faced a risk for brain development changes.
In Bajic's study, researchers took MRI scans of full-term infants who underwent life-saving surgery (in this case, for the repair of a gastrointestinal congenital abnormality). In these surgeries, infants were under prolonged exposure to sedatives like morphine before turning 1 year old.
Researchers found multiple brain abnormalities via the study's MRI scans, notably in the gray and white matter structures and ventricles in the brain. They also discovered that higher doses of sedatives meant more MRI abnormalities. The team reported the patients had more brain fluid and a smaller brain volume compared to healthy infants, a pattern they say has been previously associated with outcomes like autism spectrum disorder.
Bajic first got interested in the subject when she was a pediatric anesthesia fellow about 10 years ago. She realized that for a large number of infants who undergo life-saving surgeries, requiring prolonged sedation is the current standard of care.
Bajic emphasized the preliminary nature of her study results, and that her control group of healthy infants wasn't ideal. "The future research needs to include [a] surgical control group, which would be the children with similar type of surgery but in the absence of prolonged sedation," she said during a press conference Monday.
She also recommended conducting a study on a larger population in order to confirm slower brain growth in these patients, and suggested that future studies take a look at long-term brain function and neurobehavioral outcomes for the infants.
This study, of course, is just one way researchers are examining the effects of opioids -- a problem moderator Ed Bilsky, of Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences, put in larger context.
He showed the audience a New England Journal of Medicine article on a presentation slide. It read, "Washington D.C. is engulfed by an alarming epidemic of heroin addiction." It turned out the article was from 1971.
"It doesn't seem like we learn a lot from our past history, and that's gotta change," he said. He pointed out that there was actually a period of under-prescribing opioids in the 1980s, noting the cyclical nature of issues surrounding the drug.
Opioid overdoses account for about 90 American deaths each day, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. President Donald Trump officially proclaimed the opioid crisis a nationwide public health emergency late last month.
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David Oliver is a social media associate editor at U.S. News & World Report. Follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, or send him an email at doliver@usnews.com.
