They Say: Anaesthesia Can Cause Trouble Down the Road

As if watching your kid get wheeled away for surgery isn’t bad enough, today comes news that anaesthesia can cause developmental problems in children.

A preliminary study by Lena S. Sun, professor of anaesthesiology and pediatrics at the Columbia University found that children who were exposed to anaesthesia were about twice as likely to be diagnosed with a later behavioural or developmental disorder.

Sun looked at a database of Medicaid patients in New York. The Columbia team studied a group of children born between 1999 and 2000 who had received general anaesthesia for hernia repair and a group of 5,000 children who never had the surgery.

After adjusting for other factors associated with such disorders, such as low birth weight and gender, 30 anaesthesia-exposed children, or 4.8 percent, were found to have developmental and behavior disorders during follow up, compared with 75 unexposed children, or 1.5 percent.

Because all of the kids in the study would be considered to be economically disadvantaged, that  may have led to the higher levels of developmental or behavioral delays as well. Even the lead researcher is cautioning that these findings are preliminary and need to be looked at further.

Still, as someone whose baby just had surgery, which was thankfully minor but still required general anesthesia, UGH. It was hard enough to watch my little guy get carried away for surgery knowing they would put him under, but to know I may have put him at higher risk for more problems down the road is just upsetting.