Newswise — A new study by Florida Atlantic University ’s Schmidt College of Medicine has uncovered a disturbing trend in drug-related infant deaths in the United States from 2018 to 2022. Infant deaths are those that occur between the time a child is born and age 1. Drug-involved deaths are those in which drugs are either the primary cause of death or a contributing factor and may occur due to maternal drug use, inadvertent or accidental intake of specific prescriptions, illicit or non-medical use of drugs and other incidents where drugs were linked to death.
Results of the study, published in the Journal of Perinatal Medicine , show that in the U.S. from 2018 to 2022, drug-involved infant deaths more than doubled (120% increase) from 10.
8% in 2018 to 24.4% in 2022. The largest increase was observed between 2019 (16.
9%) and 2022 with the greatest proportion of drug-related infant deaths occurring in 2021 (25.8%). Overall, relative to all other causes of infant mortality, drug-involved deaths became more prevalent after 2019.
Findings show that drug-involved infant deaths also were higher in the postnatal period, ages 28 to 364 days (81.4%), relative to deaths due to all other causes during the same period (34.6%).
The most prevalent underlying causes of death included assault (homicide) by drugs, medicaments and biological substances (35.6%) followed by poisoning from exposure to narcotics and psychodysleptics (hallucinogens) (15.6%), and accidental poisoning from exposur.
