Can putting a child to sleep alter their brain development? The data is rather reassuring.
Having an operation on a very young child is never trivial, for him or for his parents. To the stress that the latter can legitimately feel in the face of the intervention, are sometimes added questions about the anesthesia. Toddlers are usually put to sleep to facilitate surgery, because they move too much to operate under local anesthesia alone. This does not prevent the profession from wondering for twenty years about the possible impact of anesthetic substances on the brains of young patients.
The latest to date, a French study attempted to answer the question of the behavioral and anatomical impact of general anesthesia in children, by compiling two sections of research (one on animals, the other on children). Initially, experiments were conducted on laboratory mice. In rodents exposed to an anesthetic gas (isoflurane) repeatedly, a specific area of the brain…