Anesthesia in Kids Does Not Increase Neurobehavioral Issues

TOPLINE:

Exposure to anesthesia during an appendectomy in children does not uniquely increase the risk for subsequent neurobehavioral diagnoses compared with medical admissions without anesthesia.

METHODOLOGY:

• Researchers assessed 134,388 children who underwent an appendectomy and 671,940 matched healthy children from the Medicaid database between 2001 and 2018.
• They also compared 154,887 children who were admitted to the hospital for pneumonia, cellulitis, and gastroenteritis and did not receive anesthesia with 774,435 matched healthy children.
• The primary outcome was diagnosis of neurobehavioral disorders (behavioral and mood or anxiety disorders) over a median follow-up duration of 4.7 years.

TAKEAWAY:

• Children who underwent an appendectomy had a 4% higher risk of being diagnosed with a behavioral disorder (P = .0010) and a 15% higher risk of having a mood or anxiety disorder (P < .0001) than their matched healthy controls.
• Children who were admitted to the hospital for pneumonia, cellulitis, and gastroenteritis had a 20% higher risk for behavioral disorders and a 25% increased risk for mood or anxiety disorders (P < .0001 for both) than their matched healthy controls.
• Children admitted for medical conditions and those who underwent appendectomies exhibited a larger increase in neurobehavioral problems than their matched healthy controls (P < .001).

IN PRACTICE:

“Our results suggest that elevations in the rate of neurobehavioral diagnoses after appendectomy were also found after other healthcare exposures and therefore were not specific to anesthesia exposure,” the authors wrote.

SOURCE:

The study was led by Jeffrey H. Silber, MD, PhD, of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Center for Outcomes Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, and appeared online in Anesthesiology.

LIMITATIONS:

The study relied on Medicaid data, which had inherent limitations such as variability across states and changes introduced over time. Excluding children with preexisting neurobehavioral diagnoses or chronic diseases could have limited the generalizability of the findings.

DISCLOSURES:

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development supported the study. The authors declared no competing interests.

This article was created using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.