Anesthesia is one of the main concerns of parents in the preoperative conversation of pediatric surgery. Will general anesthesia cause damage to the child’s brain? Will it affect the child’s intelligence? We have been in this industry for decades, and there are tens of thousands of children who have been anesthetized by our surgery, we have not done any survey to investigate the effect of anesthesia on the intelligence of children, from the feedback of parents, there seems to be no effect, but this is a subjective thing, no statistics and survey, no systematic investigation of the attention, cognitive ability, reading ability, observation, arithmetic ability of these children, which is one of the things we need to look into in the future. I read some articles to tell you some of the ideas and have my personal opinion, I hope it can help you. First of all, in the process of general anesthesia will use anesthetic drugs, sedative drugs and muscle relaxant drugs, in cell culture there has been clear evidence that anesthetic drugs as well as sedative drugs can damage nerve cells or even lead to their death, animal experiments for newborn animals, ketamine, sevoflurane and other anesthetic drugs will cause brain damage, will affect the intelligence of rats and monkeys, but in these experiments, the experimental subjects exposed to anesthetic drugs is generally greater than 3 hours or more. In clinical practice, many scholars have followed up and investigated children after anesthesia, and the conclusions are not quite the same; some results show that there is no effect, and some results show that there is some effect on the child’s intelligence, language, and motor ability, but the difference is not very large. Because these are retrospective surveys, retrospective surveys are inherently biased and therefore not fully credible, and the evaluation methods are not uniform, so they can only be used for reference. It is clear from these articles that for children under 3-4 years of age who receive anesthesia for more than 3 hours, or who undergo repeated surgical procedures, a small percentage of these children will have future impairment in learning ability, but these children often have congenital developmental disorders that may themselves cause intellectual impairment, so these differences are not necessarily due to general anesthesia. My personal opinion: to minimize this possibility, some surgeries are still recommended for children up to 4 years of age or older, especially those that are longer and may take more than 3 hours. However, it is better to operate earlier for diseases that have a greater impact on the child’s development. The risks and benefits should be properly evaluated, and parents should not worry too much about short surgeries. Millions of children undergo general anesthesia and surgery each year, and many diseases can cause permanent physical and psychological damage to the child, and general anesthesia is often required in problem solving, so a comprehensive understanding of the effects of general anesthesia on the child’s neurological development is very important and requires further research and analysis by the medical community.