Correctly understand anesthesia, you need to know these three points

1 | What is anesthesia

Simply put, anesthesia is the use of drugs or other methods to temporarily make the patient's entire body or part of the body lose sensation in order to achieve painlessness. The purpose of anesthesia is to help patients relieve pain during surgery, ensure patient safety, and create good conditions for surgery.

2 | Understanding the risks of anesthesia All anesthesia and surgery have risks. The extent of the risk is determined by many factors, including the patient's condition and the surgical method.

□ Patients with cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases are high-risk subjects for anesthesia;

Patients with respiratory diseases and obese patients are also at high risk of anesthesia;

□Children, elderly patients and pregnant women are also high-risk groups for anesthesia.

In general, the risk of anesthesia will increase if there is incomplete compensation of important organs such as the heart, brain, and lungs.

Of course, with sufficient preoperative preparation and precise management and control of the patient by the anesthesiologist during the operation, the risk of anesthesia can be significantly reduced and controllable.

3 | Will general anesthesia affect memory or intelligence? “Will I become stupid after anesthesia?” I believe many patients have such concerns, especially for children who need to undergo surgical anesthesia. What many parents are most concerned about is “Will anesthesia affect my child’s intelligence?”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given an authoritative answer: Repeated or prolonged use of general anesthesia and sedatives in children under three years old or in women in the last three months of pregnancy may affect the development of the child's brain. In fact, every surgery is a process of weighing risks and benefits, and the general anesthesia drugs currently used are safe, short-acting, and reversible. For surgeries that must be performed on children under three years old, as long as they are not multiple surgeries and the operation time does not exceed three hours, then there is almost no effect on the child's intelligence.

For adults, conventional surgery and anesthesia will not significantly affect brain function, but advanced age, the disease itself, surgery and inevitable complications during surgery may lead to decreased brain function, such as excessive blood loss during surgery, prolonged hypotension, brain trauma or severe infection, or asphyxia and hypoxia. Improving the quality of perioperative management can significantly improve the prognosis of patients.