Vermont has become a nationally known leader in caring for pregnant women addicted to pain relievers and their babies.

University of Vermont Research Assistant Professor of Statistics Abigail Crocker, Ph.D., now wants the state to extend its leadership to nurturing those children as they grow up. A UVM postdoctoral associate in general internal medicine research, Crocker has launched a study – with the help of the Vermont Agency of Education and a host of healthcare providers – that will follow children exposed to opioids in-utero from the time they enter the school system and other early-childhood programs.

“There’s no data on the long-term outcomes of opioid-exposed babies,” Crocker says.

She considers this project the next chapter in the book on opioid-dependent mothers and their infants started by Anne Johnston, M.D., a UVM College of Medicine associate professor of pediatrics and neonatologist at UVM Children’s Hospital, and Marjorie Meyer, M.D., associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences and director of maternal-fetal medicine. Back in 2000, they began treating and tracking pregnant women who abuse prescription pain medication and doing the same for their newborns.

“There’s so many services that these moms need,” Crocker says. “You have to have coordinated care.”

In 2006, Crocker was working with Johnston and Meyer analyzing the data they collected and selected the topic of the opioid-dependent population and related public policy for her doctoral dissertation. That was when she first conceived of the need to continue research into these kids and their futures.

The healthcare system monitors these women as they undergo pregnancy and delivery. “But five years from now, what happens?” Crocker asks. “We lose track.”

She wonders if the moms stay clean or relapse into addiction; if the children move successfully through the school system or struggle or drop out; and if the mothers’ partners are addicted, do they get treatment?

“Many don’t have a support system,” Crocker says of the mothers. “Many still have friends and peers struggling with addiction.”

Crocker’s biggest challenge was enlisting the support and assistance of others in the state involved with caring for children, primarily in the education system and social services, to secure data sharing agreements. Her first ally was Vermont Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe.

Wendy Geller, Ph.D., data administration director at the Vermont Agency of Education and a research fellow in UVM’s Center for Research on Vermont, is Crocker’s chief partner in the project. Together they will track as many as 3,000 children – 1,000 they know were exposed to opioids and 2,000 others – assigning each child a number so they can align the data without identifying them.

The researchers now are pinpointing the data they need to collect. They can pull Individualized Education Plan records for children with special learning needs, school attendance and tardiness records, and federal 504 plans for people with disabilities. They can examine coordinated care, such as after-school support, and foster care. As the children progress in school, they can see test scores. Crocker and Geller hope to make this a longitudinal study.

“If we can make this work, we can do more together,” she says. “We have treatment programs. We have prenatal care. We have a good education system. We have all these things” to offer this population, she adds.

The goal is to determine where problems may lie for these children, so that those who make public policy and work with this high risk population can figure out ways to address the problems, Crocker says.

“It’s time to move forward and figure out what’s going on,” she says. “The data are out there.”