WEDNESDAY, Feb. 5, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Common anesthesia drugs used on children caused brain damage and learning and memory problems in infant rats, a new study says.
Researchers from the University of Virginia Health System and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis anesthetized 7-day-old rats with a combination of drugs commonly used in pediatric surgery -- midazolam, nitrous oxide and isoflurane.
After the rats recovered from anesthesia, they were divided into three groups. One group was killed and had their brains examined the next day. The second group was kept alive until they were about a month old and the third group grew into adulthood.
The latter two groups were tested to see how the anesthesia affected their learning and memory. The researchers also recorded electrical activity in the rats' hippocampus. That's a brain structure that plays an important role in learning and memory.
The study found moderately severe brain cell death occurred in several brain regions, including the hippocampus, in every rat brain they examined. The researchers also found the anesthesia caused significant learning and memory problems in the rats, both at 1 month of age and in adulthood.
The rats were tested in several kinds of mazes used to evaluate memory and learning. In all the tests, the rats that had been anesthetized in infancy performed much worse than rats that had not been subjected to the anesthesia.
The findings appear in the Feb. 1 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
More information
Here's where you can learn more about anesthesia.
