Hacker News Reader

Comment by cameldrv | Hacker News Reader

Second this. There is evidence that anesthesia causes brain damage. This shows up in the data most for babies and small children, and the elderly, where you can see it on IQ tests and chance of dementia. It's more pronounced with multiple surgeries. It may be that it's damaging everyone's brains, but it's just not as noticeable for adults. One study with twins showed about a 1.5 point IQ loss from a major surgery.

Of course, 1.5 IQ points is not likely to dramatically change the course of your life, but I would absolutely not get it if the procedure could be done under sedation.

View on HN

I'm up to about 30 hours of general anesthesia after a near fatal snowboarding accident left me with a spinal cord injury. I like to think how smart I'd be if I hadn't needed it!

Wow thats incredible. Stay strong!

On top of this, IIRC, we (meaning doctors and medical science) have basically no idea how anesthetics actually work. For instance, xenon gas has anesthetic properties. Xenon. Gas. How's that for weird?

Oh yes... I remember the aftermath of getting emergency surgery for an appendicectomy: after breezing through a major Calculus exam before that, I struggled for months waiting for the cloud of confusion and forgetfulness to lift. And to this day I’m not sure it ever did

Its such a weird thing. After a while, you begin to wonder if you just learned to work around it. I too bad a similar experience, just s/snowboad/motorcycle/.

Sounds like my experience with ADD, haha. But I also had three general anaesthesias in my life, so yeah.

I'd love to see the study for this and how they controlled for the fact that being sick enough to require general at a young age probably will ding your IQ a couple points. I'm guessing they didn't do a randomized controlled trial.

One of the studies I saw was from Sweden and it looked specifically at twins where one had been injured. This is probably about as close to an RCT as you can get. That said, it doesn't separate the anesthesia from damage due to the injury itself, or the trauma of the surgery.

Still, getting anesthesia for something like a colonoscopy or a root canal strikes me as a very disproportionate risk given the evidence.

AGAIN, these data points apply to using something like a fluorinated gas, which is what you'll get for major surgery, not Propofol, which is what they'll give you for a colonoscopy.

It takes 10-15 minutes for a regular colonoscopy, for such short time, does the side effect of anesthesia actually comparable to the "major surgery" that can easily last 5-10 hours you mentioned?

I always get the same stuff Michael Jackson was using. You fall deeply asleep for the duration, wake up pretty refreshed, only downside is that I am usually besides myself for the rest of the day. Good thing you aren't allowed to drive for the next 24 hours.

Could you post any resources that discuss this? I don't doubt that you could be correct. After a quick search I wasn't able to find any material online that really supported this claim. There is the well-known condition of 'Postoperative cognitive dysfunction', however that doesn't quite line up with the kind of brain damage you're describing.

Does this include the anesthesia given to us at the dentist? The one they give you in a shot to numb the tooth. I couldn't live without that.

No. That's local anesthesia. It's called a "nerve block". The anesthetic is injected right next to a nerve. If you imagine pain as starting somewhere, then, "travelling" upstream to your brain, the anesthesia basically interrupts signals from the point where the injection takes place.

Awesome, thanks for the explanation, that makes me feel better about going to the dentist.

I think local anesthesia does not lead to these effects (as far as we know), I also would be surprised if it does. One thing I remember when you also use N20 (laughing gas) you should either check or just take vitamin B supplements (it seems to deplete your vitamin B storages)

No, that's local, not general anesthesia.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com