Miami University Assistant Professor of Nursing Sara Arter is using a two-year $100,000 grant from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office to explore long-term health outcomes for children born with opioid exposure. 

Babies exposed to opioids in the womb live with long-term consequences from that exposure. Unfortunately, there has never been effective data collection on this group of children to determine the best support system to help them reach their potential. 

Now, with the help of a new information-sharing initiative, Arter will use her research to link state-level datasets so that opioid-exposed babies can get appropriate care throughout childhood. This will give them the best possible chance for healthy development.

Prenatal opioid exposure (POE) has been rising in Ohio over the past decade and its impacts on communities are far-reaching and consequential. Recent studies have suggested that as many as 32 per 1,000 newborns experienced POE in Southwest Ohio hospitals. These infants are often born prematurely and with low birth weight, and many face challenges well into their school years.

Implementing a comprehensive strategy to provide the most advantageous health and educational resources would be a big boost for these children and impact their long-term success. Until now, however, the data to formulate such a strategy has not been available.

Today, with the creation of a powerful new initiative called the Maternal Infant Data Hub (MIDH), Arter and her co-investigator at the University of Cincinnati, Josh Lambert, will be able to use comprehensive information to identify the highest risk babies and then track their health care experiences over the first five years of life.

The MIDH is a game changing collection of data housed at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center that links mother and child data from across medical institutions in Southwest Ohio. The data collection is used to investigate relationships between variables that may impact health outcomes.

The repository ties together information on more than 110,000 infants born at 14 regional delivery hospitals since 2013.

The MIDH draws from universal maternal drug testing implemented across Southwest Ohio in 2013. The samples cover 98 percent of mothers delivering at more than a dozen regional hospitals in the greater Cincinnati area. Specimens are tested for 47 drugs of abuse, making up the toxicology results available in the data. Universal maternal drug testing reduces the risk of bias inherent in drug testing moms individually suspected of drug use. 

"With improvements in data analysis, we can get a clearer picture than ever before," said Arter of the MIDH. "We are using these improvements to identify and better serve children in most need of services."

Three key objectives for the study include:

• Establishing poor health outcomes that commonly occur in children with Prenatal opioid exposure (POE) by comparing them to children born without POE using the MIDH.
• Identifying key interactions, such as prenatal exposure to multiple substances that could alter the effects of POE on health outcomes.
• Working with Ohio government department leaders to link data sharing between departments for insight into how individual, environmental, and social variables in early life may influence the educational outcomes of children with POE.

"Anytime you are studying humans, there are a lot of variables," Arter said. "With the improvements in data analysis and machine learning, we can get a better understanding of how these variables impact a group of individuals like babies born with POE. We hope this will generate new knowledge that will make a difference in their futures."