Neonatal abstinence syndrome children and mothers overlooked for hepatitis C screening

Babies Born in Withdrawal, Invisible in the Screening Gap: Vienna Study Exposes a Hidden Hepatitis C Burden in Mothers and Infants

When a newborn begins trembling, vomiting and crying inconsolably as opioids drain from their system, the medical team’s attention understandably turns to the crisis at hand. But a sweeping eleven-year study from Vienna suggests that a slower, quieter danger may be travelling in the same infants’ bloodstream — one that current screening rules are letting slip past unnoticed. Researchers at Klinik Ottakring, a tertiary care hospital in the Austrian capital, combed through the records of every child treated for neonatal abstinence syndrome at their centre between January 2014 and January 2025, and found a hepatitis C burden far exceeding what Austria’s prenatal care program is designed to detect. Of 238 mothers, 53 — more than one in five — carried actively replicating hepatitis C virus in their blood. The virus was transmitted to their infants at an estimated rate of 9.5 percent, and nearly a quarter of the children exposed at or before birth were never assessed for infection at all.

Hepatitis C virus, or HCV, is a single-stranded RNA virus of the Flaviviridae family that spreads through blood-to-blood contact. In adults, most acute infections go unnoticed, and the majority progress to chronic disease that can smoulder silently for decades, progressively scarring the liver toward cirrhosis and, in some patients, hepatocellular carcinoma. For children, the dominant route of infection is not needles or contaminated equipment but childbirth: the virus can cross the placenta or infect the infant during delivery, a phenomenon known as vertical or perinatal transmission. Population studies generally place the vertical transmission risk at around five percent, which is precisely why international guidelines urge systematic follow-up of babies born to viremic mothers. What makes the Vienna findings especially consequential is that HCV is now among the most treatable viral diseases known to medicine. Direct-acting antivirals — including the sofosbuvir/velpatasvir and glecaprevir/pibrentasvir regimens referenced in the study — cure more than 95 percent of patients in eight to twelve weeks, and are approved for children as young as three.

The study, published open-access in the International Journal for Equity in Health, exploited a clinical clue that most infection-surveillance efforts ignore: neonatal abstinence syndrome, or NAS. NAS is a withdrawal disorder seen in newborns exposed in utero to opioids and other substances; affected infants show tremors, irritability, feeding problems and, in severe cases, seizures, typically within days of birth. Because the syndrome only develops when the mother used substances during pregnancy, a NAS admission functions as a marker for a population at heightened risk of blood-borne infections. The Vienna cohort, assembled by a team led by Caroline Schwarz and corresponding author Michael Gschwantler of Klinik Ottakring together with pediatric colleagues, comprised 243 children — including five sets of twins — of whom 50.2 percent were male, with a median gestational age of 39 weeks and a caesarean delivery rate of 45.5 percent. Their 238 mothers had a median age of 30 years, and 88.1 percent were on opioid agonist therapy, the maintenance treatment with methadone or buprenorphine that stabilizes substance use during pregnancy.

To map the virologic landscape, the researchers reconstructed each mother’s testing history using the two-step logic that defines HCV diagnostics. First-line serology detects anti-HCV antibodies, signalling exposure to the virus at some point in the past. Because antibodies can persist even after the immune system clears the infection, a positive screen must be followed by a polymerase chain reaction test for HCV-RNA, which detects active viral replication. Of the 238 mothers, 227 — 95.4 percent — received some form of HCV testing, a strikingly high figure that reflects conscientious clinical practice at the centre. Among the 218 women who underwent serology, 116 — 53.2 percent — were anti-HCV positive, meaning more than half had been exposed to the virus. Of these, 110 proceeded to confirmatory HCV-RNA testing, and nine additional women were tested directly by PCR. In total, 53 mothers were identified as HCV-viremic. By comparison, 10 of 211 mothers tested, or 4.7 percent, were positive for HIV antigens, and 4 of 237, or 1.7 percent, carried hepatitis B surface antigen.

The infection’s footprint on the next generation was sobering. The 53 viremic mothers had borne 55 children. Only 42 of them — 76.4 percent — ever underwent HCV-RNA testing, the only reliable method in infancy because maternally derived antibodies can circulate in a baby’s blood for up to 18 months, making antibody screens uninterpretable in the first year of life. Four of the 42 tested children were viremic, yielding an estimated vertical transmission rate of 9.5 percent — nearly double the background risk typically cited in the literature. The gaps in follow-up harboured at least one more hidden case: among seven children born to antibody-positive mothers who never received RNA testing, one had been repeatedly HCV-viremic since birth. That pattern, the authors note, implies the mother’s active infection had never been diagnosed during pregnancy and the virus had been transmitted perinatally — a child carrying a diagnosable, curable infection whom the system’s diagnostic net had quietly failed to catch.

The arithmetic of what fell through the cracks is stark. Seventeen of the 238 mothers — 7.1 percent — did not receive adequate HCV testing, a figure that combines eleven women who were never screened at all with six antibody-positive mothers who never underwent confirmatory RNA testing, leaving it impossible to distinguish a cleared past infection from an active, transmissible one. On the pediatric side, 13 of the 55 virus-exposed children — 23.6 percent — never had their HCV status assessed. Each gap represents a missed opportunity for a cure that, as of 2026, takes as little as two months. The contrast with other blood-borne viruses is particularly pointed: HIV and hepatitis B screening are built into Austria’s routine prenatal care program, documented in the “parents-child health passport” that accompanies every pregnancy, while HCV — which in this population infected more than one in five women, compared with 4.7 percent for HIV and 1.7 percent for hepatitis B — is not.

The paper’s central recommendation is a technical fix with outsized consequences: HCV reflex testing in routine prenatal care. In a reflex-testing scheme, a positive antibody screen automatically triggers RNA confirmation on the same blood sample, without a new appointment, a second blood draw, or a clinician’s discretionary order. The approach is engineered to eliminate precisely the cascade failures the Vienna data lay bare — the antibody-positive mothers lost between screening steps, and the patients who never return for the follow-up visit that a two-step system implicitly demands. For a population contending with stigma, unstable housing and fragmented access to care, that simplification is not a convenience but the difference between diagnosis and blindness. Reflex testing also fits the laboratory economics: the blood is already drawn, the sample is already in the lab, and the cost of an added molecular test is small measured against the price of decades of undiagnosed chronic hepatitis, liver monitoring, and late-stage disease.

The timing matters against a global backdrop. The World Health Organization has set 2030 as the deadline for eliminating viral hepatitis as a public health threat, and perinatal transmission sits squarely on the critical path: every undiagnosed viremic mother is a potential new chronic infection in the next generation, seeding chains of transmission that will not surface clinically for decades. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended universal HCV screening for every pregnancy since 2020, and European and international clinical guidelines call for screening pregnant women and evaluating infants born to viremic mothers. Austria’s prenatal program, the authors argue, has not kept pace, leaving a population that is doubly marginalized — by substance use and by the circumstances surrounding it — outside the screening architecture that is supposed to protect mothers and their children.

The study’s design carries caveats that the authors themselves acknowledge. It is retrospective, drawing on records from a single centre, and some data were incomplete — including the seven untested children of antibody-positive mothers whose status remains unknown, one of whom turned out to be infected. The true vertical transmission rate may therefore be somewhat higher or lower than the 9.5 percent estimate, and maternal viremia may be undercounted. Yet the sheer size of the cohort — 243 children and 238 mothers assembled over eleven consecutive years — makes it one of the most detailed portraits available of hepatitis C within a European perinatal population affected by substance use, and the pattern it reveals is unlikely to be unique to Vienna. The authors frame the findings as evidence that these families constitute an underserved, at-risk population whose infections are neither systematically sought nor systematically treated.

For the four children confirmed to be viremic, and the probable fifth whose mother’s infection was never diagnosed, the clock is now the decisive variable. Chronic hepatitis C acquired at birth is typically silent through childhood, quietly laying down fibrous scar tissue in the liver while the patient grows up unaware — which is exactly why early identification, followed by antiviral cure from age three onward, can compress decades of risk into a non-event. The Vienna study’s message to policymakers is unusually concrete: clinicians are already screening nearly all of these mothers, the diagnostic tools already exist, the cures already work, and what remains is a line in the national prenatal care program that has not yet been written. Until hepatitis C joins HIV and hepatitis B in that program, the researchers conclude, a curable infection will keep moving silently from one generation to the next.