Anesthesia does not affect children General anesthesia is a type of anesthesia that is often required for surgery. This type of anesthesia allows the patient to be completely unconscious and unconscious for a certain period of time, and to undergo the surgical treatment without pain. For young children, surgery requires anesthesia more often. So, will 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. Intelligence and intellectual development In order to discuss this issue, we first talk about what is intelligence and intellectual development. Intelligence refers to a person’s ability to observe, memorize, think, and imagine. Some people view intelligence as the ability to select the best solution from among many possible solutions, i.e., the ability of the brain to receive, store, and process information from the outside world, and to extract and utilize the information from the “memory bank” in order to solve problems. Intellectual development is affected by a variety of factors, among which genetic factors are the prerequisites 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 under the action of these factors in the long term and in combination rather than in the short term and independently, in order to obtain different degrees of intellectual development, either fast or slow. Anesthetics work by blocking pain transmission During surgery, the anesthesiologist has to keep adding additional anesthetics to the person undergoing surgery as needed for the procedure. When the surgery is over, the anesthetic is discontinued. General anesthesia works by blocking the transmission of pain to the brain and temporarily suppressing the child’s consciousness. During surgery, 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 any discrepancies found. In addition, anesthesia is a reversible process, with the discontinuation of anesthesia drugs, anesthesia drugs will gradually metabolize and disappear, 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. General anesthesia side effects are temporary within a week after the operation, the patient may have 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 intellectual decline. In fact, a child’s surgery is a process of experiencing trauma and recovery takes some time, which does not mean that the child’s intellectual development has been affected. Thousands of children in our country every year because of the need for surgical treatment and receive general anesthesia, some also experience multiple times, but there is no information that general anesthesia on the child’s intelligence will have adverse effects. Moreover, intelligence is not like height and weight can be measured accurately, even the most perfect intelligence test also has limitations. Therefore, parents should not attribute the general anesthesia used during surgery to their child’s unsatisfactory performance on a particular intelligence test or examination. Of course, if severe cerebral hypoxia and brain damage occur during anesthesia, it does result in mental retardation or even vegetative state. Fortunately, the incidence of such anesthetic accidents is extremely low. In conclusion, anesthesia is an important part of modern medicine, and the vast majority of surgeries cannot be performed without it. Usually, anesthesia is very safe, general anesthesia will not affect the intellectual development of the child, parents should be correctly aware of this and understand, cooperate with the doctor for the smooth operation of the child.