• Anesthesia and analgesia · Feb 2023

    Consequences of General Anesthesia in Infancy on Behavior and Brain Structure.

    • Jean-Philippe Salaün, Audrey Chagnot, Arnaud Cachia, Nicolas Poirel, Valérie Datin-Dorrière, Cléo Dujarrier, Eloïse Lemarchand, Marine Rolland, Lisa Delalande, Pierre Gressens, Bernard Guillois, Olivier Houdé, Damien Levard, Clément Gakuba, Marine Moyon, Mikael Naveau, François Orliac, Gilles Orliaguet, Jean-Luc Hanouz, Véronique Agin, Grégoire Borst, and Denis Vivien.
    • From the Normandie Universite UNICAEN, INSERM, GIP Cyceron, Institut Blood and Brain @Caen-Normandie, Physiopathology and Imaging of Neurological Disorders, Caen, France.
    • Anesth. Analg. 2023 Feb 1; 136 (2): 240250240-250.

    BackgroundOne in 7 children will need general anesthesia (GA) before the age of 3. Brain toxicity of anesthetics is controversial. Our objective was to clarify whether exposure of GA to the developing brain could lead to lasting behavioral and structural brain changes.MethodsA first study was performed in mice. The behaviors (fear conditioning, Y-maze, and actimetry) and brain anatomy (high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging) of 6- to 8-week-old Swiss mice exposed or not exposed to GA from 4 to 10 days old were evaluated. A second study was a complementary analysis from the preexisting APprentissages EXécutifs et cerveau chez les enfants d'âge scolaire (APEX) cohort to assess the replicability of our data in humans. The behaviors (behavior rating inventory of executive function, emotional control, and working memory score, Backward Digit Span, and Raven 36) and brain anatomy (high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging) were compared in 102 children 9 to 10 years of age exposed or not exposed to a single GA (surgery) during infancy.ResultsThe animal study revealed chronic exacerbated fear behavior in the adult mice (95% confidence interval [CI], 4-80; P = .03) exposed to postnatal GA; this was associated with an 11% (95% CI, 7.5-14.5) reduction of the periaqueductal gray matter (P = .046). The study in humans suggested lower emotional control (95% CI, 0.33-9.10; P = .06) and a 6.1% (95% CI, 4.3-7.8) reduction in the posterior part of the right inferior frontal gyrus (P = .019) in the children who had been exposed to a single GA procedure.ConclusionsThe preclinical and clinical findings of these independent studies suggest lasting effects of early life exposure to anesthetics on later emotional control behaviors and brain structures.Copyright © 2022 International Anesthesia Research Society.

      Pubmed     Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…