Congratulations to Dr Susan Brogly for her award from NICHD/NIH for her proposed study to use ICES data on the safety of opioid analgesic in pregnancy. Dr. Maria Velez (Queen's Ob/Gyn), Dr. Astrid Guttmann (Hospital for Sick Kids, Pediatrics) and Professor Martha Werler (Boston University School of Public Health, Epidemiology) are Co-Investigators. They have been awarded two year funding in the amount of $118,154 US
The proposed study is entitled “A Population-Based Study to Quantify the Risks of Opioid Analgesics in Pregnancy”
The primary goal of this study is to determine the risks associated with exposure to opioids for pain in pregnancy independent of biases that have affected prior studies. We will examine several important adverse pregnancy outcomes possibly associated with such exposure including specific birth defects, preterm birth, small for gestational age birth, and stillbirth. To achieve this goal we have assembled a population-based cohort of all pregnancies in Ontario, Canada (N≈790,000) from 2012-2017, 30,262 of which were exposed to opioid analgesics during pregnancy. Using modern methods such as high-dimensional propensity score adjustment and sensitivity analyses of alternative referents (including infants unexposed to opioid analgesics and infants unexposed to opioids but prenatally exposed to other analgesics), we will determine the associations between particular opioid analgesic exposures during the etiologically relevant windows of gestation and these maternal and infant outcomes. This population-based cohort study will provide estimates of the absolute risk of these outcomes, which cannot be estimated from existing US case-control studies, and which are needed to inform maternal treatment choices. Better understanding of the risks of prenatal opioid analgesics will direct treatment of pain in pregnancy and management of exposed infants.