General anesthesia is a type of anesthesia often required for surgery that allows the patient to completely lose consciousness and sensation for a certain period of time and undergo surgical treatment without pain. For young children, surgery requires anesthesia more often than not. So, does general anesthesia affect a child’s mental development? This is the biggest common concern of many parents of children who need to undergo surgical treatment. In order to discuss this issue, let’s first talk about what intelligence and intellectual development are. Intelligence refers to a person’s ability to observe, remember, think, imagine, and so on. Some people think of intelligence as the ability to select the best solution from many possible solutions, that is, the brain’s ability to receive, store, process, and extract and use information from the “memory bank” to solve problems. Intellectual development is influenced by many factors, among which genetic factors are the prerequisite for intellectual development, the brain is the material basis for intellectual development, and the environment and education are the decisive conditions for intellectual development. Children must be exposed to long-term, combined rather than short-term, independent factors in order to develop intellectually to varying degrees, either rapidly or slowly. The role of anesthetics is to block nociceptive transmission During surgery, the anesthesiologist continually administers additional anesthetics to the recipient as needed for the procedure. When the surgery is over, the anesthetic is discontinued. The function of general anesthesia is to block the transmission of pain to the brain and temporarily suppress the child’s consciousness. During the operation, the anesthesia machine can display various vital indicators and closely monitor the blood supply to the brain, heart, kidneys and other important organs, and the anesthesiologist will correct the slightest discrepancy detected. In addition, anesthesia is a reversible process, and as the anesthetic drugs are discontinued, the anesthetic drugs will gradually metabolize and disappear, and the child will slowly wake up. Therefore, unless there is an anesthetic accident, general anesthesia will not have adverse effects on the child’s intellectual development. The side effects of general anesthesia are temporary Within a week after surgery, patients may suffer from different degrees of insomnia and short term memory impairment. As a result, some parents attribute these changes in their children after surgery to anesthesia-induced mental decline. In fact, surgery in children is a traumatic process to go through and recovery takes some time, which does not mean that the child’s intellectual development has been affected. Thousands of children in China undergo general anesthesia every year because of the need for surgical treatment, and some experience multiple times, but there is no information to show that general anesthesia has an adverse effect on the intelligence of the child. Moreover, intelligence can not be measured as precisely as height and weight, and even the most perfect intelligence test has limitations. Therefore, parents should not blame the general anesthesia performed during surgery for their child’s unsatisfactory performance on a particular IQ test or exam. Of course, if severe cerebral hypoxia and brain damage occurs during anesthesia, it can indeed result in mental retardation or even vegetation. Fortunately, the incidence of such anesthesia accidents is extremely low. In conclusion, anesthesia is an important part of modern medicine, and most surgeries cannot be performed without it. Usually, anesthesia is very safe, and general anesthesia will not affect the intellectual development of the child. Parents should understand this correctly and cooperate with the doctor for the successful surgical treatment of the child. It is worth mentioning that without surgery, there is no anesthesia, and since surgery, if there is no anesthesia, it will have a greater impact on the child. If the surgery can be postponed, try to postpone the surgery until the child is three years old. Try to wait until the child’s brain is neurologically mature before doing the surgery. If you can postpone the surgery, postpone it as much as possible! Protect the child! Many things are not yet clear. Problems found in animal experiments do not necessarily occur in humans. In the children we have anesthetized, no anesthesia-induced mental retardation has been found.