SmartTots has issued a supplement to its recent revised consensus statement on anesthesia and young children in response to a clinical trial’s preliminary outcome that found no difference in the developing brain between 2-year-olds who had undergone general anesthesia and those who had received regional anesthesia as infants.
In October, SmartTots, a partnership of the International Anesthesia Research Society and the FDA, released a revised consensus statement that cited growing evidence of potential risk of general anesthesia and sedatives for children younger than age 4. The statement urged continued research to determine whether these medications are safe and to seek alternative medications.
Soon after, preliminary results of the first prospective clinical trial showed no difference in cognitive function at age 2 between children who had been given general anesthesia for les than one hour as infants and those given regional anesthesia during hernia repair. The international trial is ongoing. (To see the supplement to the revised statement, go to http://smarttots.org/consensus-statement-supplement. For more information, see “Updated consensus statement: Research on anesthesia for babies and children,” Same-Day Surgery, December 2015.)
