Heroin In Pregnant Women Literature Review

Heroin in Pregnant Women Drug Review

Heroin is an addictive opioid that falls into the category of Class One Narcotic per the Drug Enforcement Administration (Drugdex 2016). There are many adverse effects that occurs to the individual who is using Heroin. However, because of the addictive nature these are over looked and the users continue to use the drug and cause self-harm. When people think of heroin users all the think about is the harm they are doing to their bodies, however if the user is a female and become pregnant the child born is at risk because of the drug. The article “Perinatal Effects of combined use of Heroin, Methadone, and Amphetamine during pregnancy and quantitative measurement of metabolites in hair” looks at the effects

Which is not surprising because neonatal abstinence syndrome stems from drug use during pregnancy (Su 2012). In all three cases the infants exhibited early signs of neonatal abstinence syndrome. Some of the symptoms seen were tachypnea, inability to suckle properly, and cerebral dysfunction. These are the trademark symptoms for neonatal abstinence syndrome. The low birth rate was another indicator of a complicated pregnancy. The terms for all three were nearly full, coming in at 34-38 weeks there were still low birth rates in two of the births. The heroin use and low birth rates has been seen in other studies as well. There was a study on mice that involved injecting heroin twice daily during pregnancy to see the results. There were two findings that supported the real life heroin use. After the mice gave birth the average birth rate was lower compared to the control group. The baby mice also had their dendrites looked at. The test showed decreased length and less branching in the baby mice whose mother was injected with heroin (Lu 2014). If the heroin has a similar effect in human children then that could be a possible link to the neonatal abstinence