Children who undergo anesthesia two or more times before their third birthday are more than twice as likely to develop attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a new study has found.
Mayo Clinic researchers tracked the medical records of 341 children born between 1976 and 1982 in Rochester, Minn., who developed some form of learning disability or ADHD.
They found about 7.3 percent of the children who had no exposure to anesthesia and surgery – or just one exposure -- had ADHD. But for children who had two or more exposures to anesthesia and surgery, the rate of ADHD was 17.9 percent, even after researchers accounted for other factors, including gestational age, sex, birth weight and comorbid health conditions.
Dr. David Warner, a Mayo Clinic pediatric anesthesiologist and researcher, said the team took on the project after a series of studies in laboratory animals linked anesthesia to changes in the brain.
“Those studies piqued our interest,” Warner said, in a Mayo clinic release on the study. “We were skeptical that the findings in animals would correlate with kids, but it appears that it does.”
The findings were published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.