Word: anesthesia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...results reignite a long-standing controversy over the impact of anesthesia on still developing minds and bodies. The hazards were documented in earlier studies of animals: for example, rat studies have repeatedly shown that animals exposed to anesthesia drugs in the first seven days of life - when nerve cells are forming and connecting to the larger neural network - develop problems performing maze exercises, which require memory and reasoning skills. In the 1960s, based on similar concerns over possible injury to a baby's immature nervous system, doctors advocated only light anesthesia or none at all for infants undergoing surgery. Some...
Every surgery poses risk, as doctors will inform you, but in most cases, it's a necessary one. The benefits of going under the knife frequently outweigh the risks of infection or complications, or the dangers associated with anesthesia...
...balancing benefits and risks is more difficult when the patients are babies, the most fragile population. Now a new study from the Mayo Clinic, published on March 24 in the journal Anesthesiology, finds a link between exposure to anesthesia during surgery in infancy and learning disabilities later in life - the first such study to do so in humans - making the decision to operate even more fraught for both parents and doctors. (See TIME's Year in Medicine 2008, from...
...Olmstead County, Minn., researchers tracked the number of operations each youngster underwent before age 4, as well as his or her scores on reading, writing and math tests, administered once a year from elementary school through high school. Infants who had just one exposure to anesthesia showed no greater risk of having learning problems by age 19, but those with two or more exposures had a 60% increased chance of developing a learning disability compared with babies who had not had any operations. Three or more exposures to anesthesia by age 3 doubled children's risk of having difficulty...
...that anesthesia may also put babies at greater risk for cognitive problems later in life, according to Wilder's latest findings. The author is quick to point out, however, that the data are preliminary and do not necessarily suggest a direct or definitive causal link between anesthesia and learning disabilities, only an association. "We clearly have not demonstrated that anesthetics are the cause of learning disability," says Wilder. "We don't want this to alarm the public to the point they aren't giving children appropriate medical care." It could be dangerous to deny children surgery to spare them...