Tennessee Babies born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome on the Rise

Dec 19, 2016 at 06:41 am by bryan


Tennessee is seeing a rise in the number of babies born drug dependent and most of those babies are in rural areas.

According to a new study with researchers from Vanderbilt University, the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota, an increasing number of newborns being born with drug withdrawal symptoms from opioids are in rural areas compared to births in urban areas.

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A drug dependent baby will experience withdrawals shortly after birth; it's called Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS).

Tennessee has one of the highest rates of NAS in the US.

There are also more opioid prescriptions in rural areas than in their urban and suburban counterparts. Tennessee has the second highest rate of opioid prescriptions in the US.

So far in 2016, 943 babies have been born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS) and that number is rising.

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