Children born to mothers addicted to opioids suffer through withdrawal in their first few weeks of life. Morphine is commonly used in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU) to alleviate symptoms while the kids are weaned from drug dependency. This typically takes two to four weeks, all the while the children are kept in the NICU.
A new electrical device, called Roo from Spark Biomedical, is now undergoing testing, that may help shorten the weaning time to ten days or less by stimulating the cranial nerve branches on and near the ear. The therapy it administers, called Transcutaneous Auricular Neurostimulation (tAN), reportedly motivates the brain to release endorphins that bind to opioid receptors, and thereby reduce the brain’s hunger for opioids. This technology was already successfully tested in a clinical trial on adult patients suffering from opioid withdrawal, so the same gentle-to-administer therapy was attempted with neonates as well.
“This neurostimulation is giving the brain a little bit of a boost of its own endogenous opioids to perhaps reduce the need for exogenous morphine, which has all these dangerous side effects when delivered for prolonged periods of time in this critical neurodevelopmental window,” said Bashar Badran, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). Read more
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