What Are The Symptoms Of Spina Bifida?
The news that a baby has arrived with the congenital birth defect known as spina bifida must be devastating to any new mother. At birth, the outward signs of spina bifida may not be too dramatic; in some forms, the first indication might just be an abnormal clump of hair or a small birthmark at the site of what will prove to be a spinal defect.
But this problem that occurs in pregnancy during the formation of the embryo’s neural tube – a narrow sheath that will eventually form the brain and the spinal cord – will have lifelong consequences for a child as it grows. They are several types of spina bifida, and the most serious variations can cause partial or even significant paralysis or make the child more prone to infection, and even lesser forms can affect learning or coordination.
Fortunately, spina bifida is not common. There are roughly 4 million babies born in the United States every year, and only about 1,500 to 2,000 will be diagnosed with the condition. Public health officials estimate that the total U.S. population of those afflicted with spina bifida is about 166,000.
The bad news is that another American public health crisis may be increasing the prevalence of this neural tube birth defect – the heartbreak of opioid abuse. Thanks to aggressive marketing by Big Pharma, the growth in prescription painkillers like Purdue Pharma’s Oxycontin since the 1990s has caused a surge in addiction and lethal overdoses.
But despite warnings from the nation’s main public-health agencies going back nearly a decade, there is much less public awareness about the problems encountered by children who are exposed to opioids while the womb, including their elevated chance of birth defects such as spina bifida. In 2011, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that women whose babies had been born with spina bifida where twice as likely to have taken opioids during their pregnancy than mothers whose children had no birth defects.
Justice for kids exposed to opioids in the womb
This finding, when coupled with the many other health problems experienced by children whose mothers took opioid painkillers during pregnancy – including the most common, which is Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, or NAS – should have been a red flag for America’s physicians to take special care not to prescribe these drugs to women bearing children. Unfortunately, many doctors seemed unaware of the mounting medical evidence.
Our team of lawyers – the Opioid Justice Team – has been fighting for justice for families raising these children who were exposed to opioid medications such as Oxycontin while in the womb. We’re in court and deeply involved in negotiations seeking to make sure that Purdue Pharma – which recently filed for bankruptcy – and the other large pharmaceutical companies pay for long-term monitoring and health care for these kids, the littlest victims of America’s opioid crisis.
In making our case, we’ve consulted with top medical experts who made a startling discovery – that the United States has seriously underestimated the number of children coping with the effects of opioid exposure in the womb. Their research showed that actually about one-in-three pregnant women in America — or roughly 1.3 million out of the 3.8 million women who gave birth — had been given a prescription for opioid painkillers. Their work has established that a baby with serious problems related to opioid exposure is born somewhere in the United States every 19 minutes, which amounts to as much as 250,000 children every year.
Health effects of in-utero opioid exposure
The majority of these children experienced NAS – a form of opioid withdrawal – at birth. In the hospital, NAS causes symptoms such as body shakes, excessive crying or yawns, feeding problems, diarrhea, sleeping problems, fever, or runny noses. But after these babies are sent home — as both experts and parents are increasingly finding – many have struggled with an array of developmental, behavioral and learning difficulties as they grow.
But while NAS is starting to receive some attention in the medical community and the mainstream media, the problem of opioids and birth defects has received far less attention, even after the research and warnings from the CDC.
The CDC research found that rates of gastroschisis — in which a baby is born with its intestines hanging outside the stomach, due to a hole in the abdominal wall, and which affect about 1,800 U.S. newborns every year — are about 60 percent higher in the counties that had the highest rates of prescription opioid use. In addition to spina bifida, other neural tube defects — which often take place during the first month of pregnancy — that showed increased risk in the 2011 CDC study included anencephaly, where most of the brain and skull don’t fully develop
There are four types of spina bifida: occulta, closed neural tube defects, meningocele, and myelomeningocele. The most common form, occulta, in which one or more vertebrae are malformed, rarely causes any major symptoms or disabilities. But the most severe type, myelomeningocele, can lead to partial or complete paralysis below the opening in the spine. Children with this form of spina bifida might be unable to walk, or can have bladder or bowel disfunction.
More spina bifida symptoms
Babies who are born with either meningocele and myelomeningocele typically have a fluid-filled sac that is visible on the back and protruding from the spinal canal. In meningocele, the sac may be covered by a thin layer of skin. Typically with myelomeningocele, there is no layer of skin covering the sac; often, some of the abnormally developed spinal cord tissue is exposed.
Generally, the higher on the spinal cord any malformation is located, the more nerves that will be affected, which will lead to greater loss of muscle function and sensation. But neural tube defects can also negatively impact brain development. Cognitive problems – affecting the child’s awareness, thinking and learning abilities – can develop, especially if the frontal portion of the brain’s cortex does not fully develop. Other problems involve CSF, a watery substance that flows in around the brain and spinal cord. Too much CSF can lead to hydrocephalus — pressure on the brain — and ultimately to brain damage.
The fight for justice
Raising a child affected by spina bifida can place enormous pressure on a family. That’s why the Opioid Justice Team is committed to making the pharmaceutical industry pay for its gross negligence in the way these dangerous drugs now linked to spina bifida were marketed to physicians and the public.
Our attorneys have gone into federal court to get children born to prescription opioid-dependent-and-using mothers recognized as their own legal class within the national opioid litigation, which is currently before U.S. District Court Judge Daniel A. Polster in Cleveland. We’ve already filed lawsuits in a number of states seeking recognition for the legal rights of these kids and their families.
Much of what we seek is basic common sense. For example, our team has asked that doctors treating female patients who are in their child-bearing years be given a pregnancy test before they can be prescribed any medication containing opioids – the same precaution currently taken with other prescription drugs such as Accutane. We are also pushing for creation of a medical monitoring fund, which will help doctors better understand the health and other developmental problems of these children as they grow.
Children often get a raw deal from the American legal system. In the current case against Big Pharma, the plaintiffs include many of the exact same states and localities who received billions of dollars in the infamous Big Tobacco settlement of the late 1990s and then used the money to balance their budgets rather than improve public health. We’re on a mission to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
Unfortunately, time is running very short for new plaintiffs to participate in our legal fight against the greed of the big drug companies. We encourage those eligible to join us and make sure that, this time, any settlement dollars go to the families and communities that actually need them.
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