Many parents have questions: Will general anesthesia really affect children’s intellectual development?

Anesthesia is the most essential part of surgery, but due to the mystery and unfamiliarity, people often have certain misunderstandings about anesthesia. Will the child's intelligence be affected after the anesthetic injection? What are the different harms caused by different anesthesia sites and depths? Mysteries shroud parents and even make everyone hesitate to face surgery.

Let the anesthesiologist tell you whether general anesthesia surgery will affect children’s intellectual development?

What is general anesthesia surgery?

General anesthesia surgery generally refers to general anesthesia, which means that the child inhales the anesthetic through the respiratory tract, or injects it into the child's body through the vein or muscle, which produces a temporary inhibitory effect on the central nervous system. The clinical manifestations are loss of consciousness, loss of pain sensation throughout the body, amnesia, reflex inhibition and skeletal muscle relaxation.

The purpose of general anesthesia is to eliminate the child's fear of surgery, as well as the pain and stress caused by the surgery, and to facilitate the smooth progress of the surgery. At present, the main drugs used for general anesthesia include sedatives (amnesia), analgesics, and muscle relaxants, which means that on the basis of what we usually think of as deep sleep, analgesia, muscle relaxation, and retrograde amnesia are added. It is a means of temporarily suppressing the child's consciousness and is completely reversible, which also means that the analgesic, muscle relaxation, and retrograde amnesia effects of anesthetic drugs can be restored.

Will general anesthesia affect children's intelligence?

At present, anesthetic drugs and techniques are relatively mature, and anesthesia during surgery is relatively safe. General anesthesia will not have adverse effects on children's intelligence. However, since general anesthetics have hypnotic, analgesic, and amnesiac effects, they will have a short-term impact on the child's memory before and after the operation. This can enable the child to better cooperate with the operation and avoid the psychological impact of the child's fear memory of the operation after recovery.

General anesthetics are cleared from the child's blood and central nervous system quickly, with no drug accumulation in the body, allowing the child to wake up quickly. Therefore, they have no effect on the child's memory after he or she fully wakes up, nor will they affect the child's intellectual development.

According to research, brain damage is related to the child's own condition. For example, severe laryngeal spasm, massive bleeding, cardiac arrest, etc. during surgery can cause hypoxia damage to brain tissue cells, which will affect the child's intellectual development. It has no obvious direct relationship with the anesthetic drugs themselves.

Will prolonged surgery and anesthesia have a greater impact on children’s intelligence?

Long-term surgery has many effects on children, including surgical trauma, infection, drug accumulation, hypothermia, etc., not just anesthesia alone. If only anesthesia is considered, there is currently no clinical research to prove that anesthetic drugs will affect children's intellectual development.

However, in animal experiments on undeveloped infants, we found that long-term, high-dose, and repeated use of anesthetic drugs may have an impact on them. This suggests that we should try to avoid long-term, high-dose, and multiple general anesthesia in infants whose brains are not yet fully developed.

Many children suffer from congenital diseases and need surgical intervention early or even immediately after birth to save their lives. At this time, parents and doctors should weigh the pros and cons. If surgery is required, it should be performed as soon as possible. For anesthesiologists, "numbing" the child is only a small part of the job. What is more important is to maintain the child's vital signs throughout the perioperative period and ensure the safety, smoothness and stability of the operation. This is the top priority of the anesthesiologist's work.

summary

General anesthesia does have a certain impact on children. In a short period of time, children may experience varying degrees of memory impairment, but this phenomenon is only temporary and will not have a long-term impact on children's intelligence. With the continuous advancement of medical science, general anesthesia surgery is now very safe and basically does not cause harm to the human body. Parents do not need to worry too much about anesthesia, just relax and leave everything to the anesthesiologist.