Emotional behavior altered after multiple exposures to anesthesia during infancy

http://ekaweb02.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/tmsh-eba083115.php

Public Release: 3-Sep-2015
Emotional behavior altered after multiple exposures to anesthesia during infancy
The Mount Sinai Hospital / Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Repeated exposure to anesthesia early in life causes alterations in emotional behavior that may persist long-term, according to a study from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in collaboration with the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and published in the Online First edition of Anesthesiology, the official medical journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists®.

Each year, approximately one million children under the age of four undergo surgery with general anesthesia, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Retrospective birth-cohort studies of children have found an association between learning problems and multiple exposures to anesthesia early in life, and research in animal models, mainly rodents, has shown that early anesthesia exposure causes cell death in the brain and cognitive impairments later in life.

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The Mount Sinai/Yerkes study is the first to address the question of whether repeated postnatal anesthesia exposure, in and of itself, caused long-term behavioral changes in a highly translationally relevant rhesus monkey model. The stage of neurodevelopment of rhesus monkeys at birth is more similar to that of human infants compared to neonatal rodents; with respect to brain growth, a six-week-old rhesus monkey corresponds to a human in the second half of his or her first year of life. Because these kinds of controlled studies cannot be carried out in humans, it is essential to use a comparable animal model to discover if anesthesia may be affecting the brain. Unlike previous research, the study was conducted in the absence of a surgical procedure, co-morbidities that may necessitate surgical intervention or the psychological stress associated with illness.

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"Our results confirm that multiple anesthesia exposures alone result in emotional behavior changes in a highly translational animal model. This raises concerns about whether similar phenomena are occurring during clinical anesthesia exposure in children."

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They found the anesthesia-exposed infants expressed significantly more anxious behaviors overall compared with controls.

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