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.
Kids who had been exposed to anesthesia two or three times before age four had school grades between one and two percent lower than the comparison group of kids, the authors report.
The difference was less than the impact of mother’s level of education, gender and even month of birth, said lead author Dr. Pia Glatz of Kalmar County Hospital in Sweden
Surgical management, the surgery itself and whatever caused the surgery to be necessary in the first place may also have played a role, although none of the children in this study had any serious medical diagnoses, the authors note.
