Laboratory methods for detecting cocaine use during pregnancy

Use of cocaine during pregnancy may have harmful effects on the developing fetus. Attempts to correlate maternal use of cocaine with postnatal developmental problems in the newborn have been hampered by the lack of reliable laboratory methods for determining whether cocaine exposure occurred. Conventional methods for qualitative detection of cocaine in urine specimens are not well suited for clinical circumstances involving minimal or temporally remote exposures. Of the alternative specimens available for drug analysis, hair appears to offer the most promising opportunity for detecting cocaine use that occurred early in pregnancy.