Anesthesia before 4 years of age can affect the child's academic performance later

A serious, unintended harm comes from anesthesia for children before the age of four, which has been found by the medical community.

A Swedish researcher has just concluded that children who are anesthetized by surgery before the age of 4 tend to be less educated later on, and their IQ in teenage years is also lower. are talking compared to normal children.

To get this result, Dr. Pia Glatz of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and colleagues examined the medical records of hundreds of thousands of children born in Sweden from 1973 to 1993.

The researchers focused on the profile of about 160,000 children, in which one side had never had surgery, the other side had surgery at least once and before 4 years of age with the number of 33,500 records. check. And these children are monitored for IQ, learning outcomes until age 18.

The results showed that children before 4 years of age, who had undergone 1 operation, each time were anesthetized, had poor learning results than those who did not undergo surgery at the rate of 0.41% and IQ these children were 0.97% lower than normal at age 18.

Just like that, for children under 4 years of age who underwent surgery twice, that means having 2 anesthesia results in 1.41% lower learning outcomes than normal children, and 3 times surgery and anesthesia. the learning results are 1.82% lower than those of normal children.

Currently, the scientific group is continuing to study more in-depth about the harmful effects of anesthesia with mental and educational problems and can carry out many other related surveys.

This research has just been published in JAMA Pediatrics.