A study done by researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, found that kids who received anesthesia before the age of two are at an increased risk for learning disabilities. The FDA, however, feels that there might be other factors influencing this result.
A new study was led by Randall Flick, MD, at the Mayo Clinic. The researchers found that kids who had surgery that required the use of anesthesia before the age of two were twice as likely to end up with learning disabilities, (when compared to children who did not have anesthesia before they turned two years old).
The study adds to the previous evidence that connects repeated early exposure to general anesthesia with learning disabilities. However, it doesn’t conclusively state that the entire reason for the correlation is due specifically to the anesthesia. In general, sick kids end up having more learning disabilities than their peers do. Sick children also end up needing more surgeries than their peers would, (and surgeries involve exposure to anesthesia).
The study included 1,050 children. The kids were born between the years 1976 and 1982. All of them attended school in one particular school district in Rochester, Minnesota. A total of 350 of these children had one or more surgeries that required the use of general anesthesia before the child had reached his or her second birthday. These kids were compared with 700 children who did not have a history of surgery.
The researchers found that the 37% of the kids who had undergone multiple surgeries that required the use of general anesthesia before the child was two years old had learning disabilities. The kids who had only one surgery, with general anesthesia, before they turned two years old had a different result. Only 24% of them had learning disabilities. The kids who had no surgeries had the lowest percentage of learning disabilities. Out of that group, only 21% of the kids had learning disabilities.
Later on, as the children got older, there were more results. The kids who had two or more surgeries prior to age two were three to four times more likely to have been identified by their schools as needing additional help. This means that these kids were more likely than their peers were to have an IEP, and to require special help for language and speech difficulties.
One problem with this study is that it doesn’t consider the potential impact of the illness that the child had that required the surgeries in the first place. Did the early exposure to the anesthesia cause the learning difficulties? Or, did the disease that the child had that made the surgery necessary have some impact on the child’s brain? It isn’t easy to tell which factor had more of an impact.
Image by Joe Marinaro on Flickr