Assessment of the relative clinical utility of shortened Finnegan neonatal abstinence scoring tools

Objective: To assess the proposed shortened tools based on the Finnegan neonatal abstinence scoring tool (FNAS) for relative clinical utility.

Study design: Retrospective study comparing shortened tools with FNAS on need for treatment, medication initiation cutoff score agreement, and length of treatment in 369 infants with prenatal opioid exposure using estimated areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves, Pearson and Spearman correlations, and proportion correctly classified, sensitivity, and specificity.

Results: The tools by Gomez et al. and Chervoneva et al. are most predictive of the FNAS cut-off values to initiate treatment, have cutoff values that best align with the FNAS cutoff values, and strongly correlate with the FNAS (r ≥ 0.88 corresponding to treatment initiation, r ≥ 0.83 during first 10 days of treatment).

Conclusion: The tools of Gomez and Chervoneva demonstrated potential clinical usefulness by strongly associating with the need for treatment and monitoring the course of NAS therapy.