A new study suggests that children exposed to anesthesia are more predisposed to developmental and behaviour problems later on compared to those with no history of anesthesia.

The findings of a preliminary study conducted by Lena S. Sun, professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics at the Columbia University and colleagues must be confirmed. The results should be interpreted with caution, Dr. Lena S. Sun added.

Sun presented the preliminary results of the study Tuesady at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists in Orlando, Fla.

Using 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 anesthesia for hernia repair and a group of 5,000 children who never had the surgery. When they compared the two groups, Sun’s team found that the anesthesia-exposed children were about twice as likely to be subsequently diagnosed with a developmental or behavior disorder.

More exactly, after adjusting for factors such as low birth weight and gender, which are usually associated with behavioural and developmental disorders, researchers concluded that 30 anesthesia-exposed children (4.8 percent) were diagnosed with developmental and behavior disorders during follow up, compared with 75 unexposed children (1.5 percent).

The findings may have been influenced by the fact that all the children in the study were economically disadvantaged, because they were all enrolled in the Medicaid program. But more research needs to be done to look at this question, Sun cautions. Sun and colleagues from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons are planning a new study in which they will follow anesthesia-exposed children and compare their developmental evolution to that of a sibling.