Children undergo general anesthesia surgery, is it safe | |子口腔科普
Original 2015-08-25 Yu Onion, Fan Lin ~ sub oral science popularization Beijing University Stomatology Hospital, Department of Pediatric Dentistry Wang Wenjun
Children are sick, and some of them are surgical diseases that require surgical treatment. Surgical incisions must be anesthetized, and the vast majority require general anesthesia (general anesthesia).
Many parents struggle with one question: Is general anesthesia safe?
First of all, it should be noted that children under the age of 10 have poor self-control, especially after entering the operating room, the environment is unfamiliar, and parents are not around, fear, fear is self-evident. If not general anesthesia, children often cry and struggle, do not cooperate, the operation is difficult to carry out.
General anesthesia allows the patient to completely lose consciousness and sensation for a certain period of time, so that they can receive surgical treatment without pain.
Does general anesthesia affect a child’s mental development?
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, etc. 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 a variety of factors, genetic factors are the prerequisite, the brain is the material basis, and the environment and education are the decisive conditions. Children must be exposed to the long-term, combined, rather than short-term, independent effects of these factors in order to develop intellectually to varying degrees, either rapidly or slowly.
What is the role of anesthetics?
Anesthetics work by blocking nociceptive transmission.
General anesthesia works by blocking the transmission of nociception to the brain and temporarily inhibiting the patient’s consciousness.
During the surgery, the anesthesiologist has to keep adding additional anesthetics to the person undergoing the surgery according to the needs of the surgery and strictly according to the weight of the child. When the surgery is over, the anesthetic is also discontinued.
Throughout the process, the anesthesia machine can display various vital indicators and closely monitor the blood supply to the brain, heart, kidneys and other important organs, and if the slightest abnormality is detected, the anesthesiologist will correct it in time.
In addition, anesthesia is a reversible process, with the discontinuation of anesthetic drugs, the anesthetic drugs will gradually metabolize and disappear, and the patient will slowly wake up.
Therefore, unless there is an anesthetic accident, general anesthesia will not have adverse effects on the intellectual development of the child.
The side effects of general anesthesia are temporary
General anesthesia drugs directly affect the life of the patient, the world’s countries are extremely strict requirements for this.
All general anesthesia drugs on the human brain nerve suppression is temporary, but also reversible.
After reaching a certain time in the body, anesthetic drugs will gradually be detoxified by the liver to reduce metabolism, partly by the respiratory tract, digestive tract, urinary system out of the body, the patient will wake up.
During the period when the general anesthetic drugs are not completely metabolized and excreted in the body, the patient remains in a sleepy state, which is actually beneficial to the postoperative recovery and beneficial to the organism.
Within a week after surgery, patients may experience varying 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 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 due to the need for surgical treatment, and some experience multiple times, but there is no information showing 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 cause mental retardation or even become a vegetable. Fortunately, the incidence of such anesthesia accidents is extremely low.