Positive urine tox for alcohol?

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Specializes in Level III NICU.

Anyone have any idea about how much alcohol a woman would have to drink for her baby to have a + Utox? I'm trying to get an idea of how drunk this woman could have been when she delivered. I have never seen a baby's Utox come back + for alcohol. Plenty of other things, but never alcohol.

I guess it depends on what level each individual hospital would deem "positive," right? I always thought that however drunk mom is, the baby is. Our lab said that this result was low, but definitively positive.

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You would also have to consider how soon before delivery she had a drink. Maybe a glass of wine an hour prior or a bottle of vodka last night?

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Specializes in Level III NICU.

Well, there was an MVA involved, followed by the stat c-section. So I guess we're thinking that she may have been driving drunk. I've been off for a few days, so I don't know if anything new has come up.

Is there anything that would give a false positive for alcohol? Some kind of medication or something? I really want to believe that she wouldn't be driving drunk at 34 weeks pregnant!

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Specializes in Level III NICU.

So, thanks to another thread over in the General Nursing forum, I found a possible answer. Urine can test positive for alcohol if one is dehydrated, or if the urine has high levels of sugar or acetone. This baby was barely peeing, making me think that maybe it was positive for the above reasons, and not because mom was out drinking.

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Did mom test positive?

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Specializes in Level III NICU.
Did mom test positive?

Well, apparently they didn't do a tox on mom. From what I heard, the ED does not routinely do tox screens on MVA patients because if anything comes back positive, insurance will not pay. Not sure how true that is. Seems like it could be true, since it's all about the dollar. Also, I heard that because she was a trauma and got rapid transfusions and fluids, they couldn't get one. I don't really know.

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Specializes in Community, OB, Nursery.

We see babies with UDSs come back +EtOH fairly frequently, however, not under the circumstances you describe. And in our situations, it's hard to tell whether they are drunk or not because they are generally high on something else

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I'd lay dollar to doughnuts she was.

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Specializes in Level III NICU.
I'd lay dollar to doughnuts she was.

As more and more info is coming out, me too. So sad.

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