In response to growing evidence of potential harm, a federal advisory panel is considering whether subjecting children to anesthesia poses risks to the long-term development of the brain.
As The New York Times reports, the Food and Drug Administration panel at its Thursday meeting will evaluate existing research, consider recommending further studies and discuss whether warnings about the potential risks should be relayed to parents.
The problem is growing more pressing in part because of medical advances that allow children to survive previously debilitating or fatal diseases; typically, such advances require surgical procedures, which, in turn, rely on anesthesia.
“We don’t know what this means for children at this time,” said Dr. Bob Rappaport, the director of the FDA’s division of anesthesia and analgesia products. “That’s exactly why it’s so critical that we get all of the necessary information.” Rappaport also detailed the panel’s challenges in an article in the The New England Journal of Medicine.
While advisory panels do not obligate the FDA to adopt a given position, the agency ordinarily follows the recommendations.
Recent research has demonstrated that when used on young laboratory animals, anesthesia has precipitated future developmental problems. Researchers have documented the death of brain cells in young rodents and monkeys after being given anesthesia, and a new FDA study found that a 24-hour exposure to anesthesia among five-day-old rhesus monkeys led to future cognitive problems.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to say, ‘Geez, if this happens in monkeys, then there’s a high probability that something like this occurs in humans,’” Dr. Randall Flick, a panel member and associate professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics at the Mayo Clinic, told the Times.
With children, such controlled studies are impossible to carry out. Instead, researchers have focused on youngsters who already have learning disabilities and other developmental problems, to try to find out if the problems can be associated with previous experiences with anesthesia.
Although such research has its limitations, it has found that children with cognitive problems are more likely to have been given anesthesia. The correlation between developmental issues and anesthesia is even stronger when a child has been anesthetized more than once.
