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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday November 08 2016, @07:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the breathe-deeply-and-count-backwards-from-100 dept.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-kids-anesthesia-idUSKBN1322D3

Kids who are exposed to surgical anesthesia before age four tend to have slightly lower school grades at age 16 compared to other kids, but the difference is very small and shouldn't discourage parents from proceeding with necessary surgeries, researchers say.

The "low overall difference in academic performance after childhood exposure to surgery is reassuring," they write in JAMA Pediatrics.

Studying the health and school records of more than 2 million children born in Sweden between 1973 and 1993, the researchers identified 33,000 children who had one surgery with anesthesia before age four and 159,000 children who were similar in most ways but had not had surgery or anesthesia before age 16.

On average, kids who'd had anesthesia had 0.41 percent lower school grades at age 16 and 0.97 percent lower intelligence quotient (IQ) scores at age 18.

Association of Anesthesia and Surgery During Childhood With Long-term Academic Performance (open, DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2016.3470) (DX)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:24PM

    by frojack (1554) on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:24PM (#424222) Journal

    How did the study distinguish the effect of Anesthesia from the effects of surgery itself, or the reason for the surgery, or the period of hospitalization and how scary that might be for a child that age?

    Surgery on a child less than 4 is rare enough that just finding enough subjects to analyze would be difficult, as exhibited by the study's need to require a 20 year canvassing period, during which surgery, anesthesia, and IQ tests all changed dramatically.

    How can you measure .97 lower IQ when the IQ test has a higher variability than that built into its design?

     

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  • (Score: 2) by buswolley on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:47PM

    by buswolley (848) on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:47PM (#424238)

    Surgery before age 4 is more common than you think.

    In humans, you cannot run a trial that denies anesthesia to a group for obvious ethical reasons. One possibility being explored is to find infants exposed to general anesthetic for MR imaging, but with a negative finding (thus requiring no further medical intervention). However, those exposures tend to be short in duration, and not too frequent...making research difficult. In animal models however, all these manipulations are possible, and have been explored (e.g. sham surgeries, just exposure to anesthetic, etc.) and these data routinely cause negative effects due to the general anesthetic exposure (e.g. sevoflurane, isoflurane, NO2).

    Finally, since the preponderance of data suggests timing and length of exposure or the key moderator of outcomes, it is possible that surgeries that can be postponed to a later age should. Also, some surgeries don't need to be completed in a single 3 hour procedure, but could be broken up into multiple shorter surgeries.

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  • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday November 08 2016, @09:15PM

    by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 08 2016, @09:15PM (#424247)
    It's an open-access study, so maybe go read it? Have questions, there is contact info for the corresponding author for just such an emergency. I'm almost certain you will get more accurate information from doing that than asking on here.
  • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Tuesday November 08 2016, @11:45PM

    by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Tuesday November 08 2016, @11:45PM (#424291)

    As to your question of precision of measurement....
    You can get an accurate statistical measure of very small differences in a variable of interest (IQ score for instance) as follows.
    The individual variability of a test may be a few points (even in the same individual in test-retest). However if you test thousands of individuals and aggregate their scores, their scores will follow a normal distribution (in most cases, also called a bell-curve). Those two groups will have different means to their bell-curves and as you get more data the curves will diverge enough to be statistically different. This difference can be less than individual variability in a measure (as we assume that the individual test-retest variability is also similarly distributed).
    They're relatively safe assumptions in this context.
    Now the more important question is, "does it matter?"
    Well in this case, as you say, the difference is small so it's probably not a big deal but it can still be a real (and small) difference.