Early anesthesia may hinder kids’ learning
Children exposed to anesthetic drugs more than once before age 4 seem to face an added risk of developing a learning disability
By Nathan Seppa
Children under age 4 who get multiple courses of general anesthesia for surgery seem to be at greater risk of developing a learning disability later in childhood, compared with kids not exposed to the drugs, researchers report in the April Anesthesiology.
Despite this apparent danger, the researchers acknowledge that they don’t know whether the knock-out drugs are responsible for the risk or if children needing surgeries are just prone to developing learning disabilities.
“We feel strongly that this data is preliminary,” says study coauthor Randall Flick, a pediatrician and anesthesiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
Flick and his colleagues consulted a medical registry of people born in Olmstead County, Minn., between 1976 and 1982 and identified 593 children who received anesthesia before reaching age 4 and 4,764 others who didn’t.