Mayo Clinic researchers say that if children have anesthesia 2 or more times before the age of 3, they are at higher risk for developing learning disabilities later on in life.

 

The study was published March 24 in the journal Anesthesia. It involved a group of more than 5,000 children born between 1976 and 1982 in Olmstead County, Minn.

 

The researchers, led by Dr. Robert Wilder, tracked the number of operations each youngster received 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. Dr. Wilder is a consultant in anesthesiology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and an associate professor of anesthesiology at the Mayo Medical School.

 

The researchers found that children who underwent multiple surgeries as infants or toddlers were twice as likely to have learning disabilities compared to those who had one surgery or none at all.

 

However, Dr. Wilder doesn’t want to alarm parents. “We have an association here between kids who received two or more anesthetics in surgery and an increase in learning disabilities, but we don't have clear causality that it was the anesthetics that caused the learning disabilities,” he said, adding that most surgeries can’t be done without an anesthetic, as they can lead to death. “Trying to operate without adequate anesthesia is worse than the effects that we saw in this study.”

 

Moreover, Dr. Wilder said that anesthesia administered before surgeries is not necessarily the problem, but it could be the stress from multiple surgeries, or the illnesses themselves could have impaired the kid’s neurological development.