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Doctors at UZ Leuven have established in a study that local or full anesthesia in pregnant women has no significant effect on the further development of the child’s brain. It is the first study to investigate the effect of anesthesia on neurological development in children, and was published in the medical journal Anaesthesia.
ltoBron: BELGIAN
UZ Leuven examined 129 children between 2 and 18 years old, whose mothers had undergone a non-obstetric procedure under general or local anaesthetic during pregnancy. Data on possible psychosocial problems or learning disabilities were collected via questionnaires to parents. Those data were compared with those of 453 children in the control group, whose mothers had not received anesthesia during pregnancy.
Although generally avoided, 1 percent of pregnant women still require urgent non-obstetric surgery, such as acute appendicitis.
“We generally did not see any clinically relevant differences between the two groups,” explains Prof. Dr Steffen Rex, head of anesthesiology department at UZ Leuven and principal investigator of the study. “So anesthesia during pregnancy is not associated with certain developmental problems in children.
Small effects were noted, for example, in women who had undergone long-term anaesthesia. “These are comparable in magnitude to other factors such as the age of the mother,” said Rex. “So our results are reassuring for pregnant women undergoing surgery. We do emphasize that the current guideline continues to apply: we only perform an operation during pregnancy in urgent and life-threatening situations.”