Oei, Ju Lee, Melhuish, Edward, Uebel, Hannah, Azzam, Nadin, Breen, Courtney, Burns, Lucinda, Hilder, Lisa, Bajuk, Barbara, Abdel-Latif, Mohamed E., Ward, Meredith, Feller, John M,, Falconer, Janet, Clews, Sara, Eastwood, John, Li, Annie, and Wright, Ian M. (2017) Authors' response. Pediatrics, 139 (6). e20170972B.

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Abstract

[Extract] We thank Prof Terplan and colleagues for their commentary on our article. We agree that the criteria used to define NAS in our study were restrictive (International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision code P96.1) and that there was no information on important clinical and social details that may have had potential impact on a child’s learning ability, such as type of specific drug exposure or social issues.

This is indeed a deficiency that is well acknowledged by studies based on administrative data but is not a reason to ignore such data, which should be used cautiously to inform future policy and practice. Acquiring alternative data from individual patients on a large scale will be prohibitively expensive and may not be feasible because of the cost and possibly high attrition rates in such a chaotic population.

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