Effect of General Anesthesia in Infancy on Long-Term Recognition Memory | Hacker News Reader

Effect of General Anesthesia in Infancy on Long-Term Recognition Memory

nature.com

43 pointsgivan19 comments

My son, who's now 2 1/2, has had endoscopies every six months starting from when he was 9 months old. (He suffers from eosinophilic esophagitis, and the only way to accurately determine his eosinophil levels is to biopsy tissue from the esophagus.)

So, this study obviously worries me a great deal. It's definitely something I'll want to ask his doctors about ... but I have a feeling that the answer will be that it's a downside we'll have to accept.

Interesting to me on a personal level. I have a recently born son who underwent surgery at 2 months. The procedure itself is incredibly simple and safe; the anesthesia was the part that actually concerned us the most, (and my father is a trained anesthesiologist to boot).

There was a non-surgical alternative to what we did, but it was recommended against. It has a much lower success rate and is the difference between a day in the hospital and several months of carefully measured feeding.

Even equipped with this knowledge, I suspect that I would make the same decision. It is more important to me that my son be physically healthy and thriving than anything. I am curious if others would make the decision differently.

Without knowing any of the details,

>several months of carefully measured feeding.

That doesn't sound that bad, at least as a temporary solution to an otherwise permanent problem?

I've been through this before - any time a doc recommends surgery it's worth getting second and third opinions. Sometimes the first one is that guy with the hammer to whom every problem looks like a nail.

That doesn't sound bad when taken by itself. Infants, however, are interesting things. They may be sponges, but if I've learned anything in the last couple of years since my wife and I had our first child, it's that their development occurs in weird, non-linear ways, and requires a lot of effort and practice on their part. Stressing them out severly can (and does) impair development.

Aside from that, I suspect I know what condition the original commenter is talking about--or at least my wife and I had a child who, at roughly 5 weeks, was given an almost identical choice for a condition he had. This particular condition is such that food either cannot pass out of the stomach into the intestine, or can only do so in quantities insufficient to provide adequate nutrition. It comes with a variety of nasty side effects, such as severe projectile vomiting when the stomach-digested food accumulates (hence the "carefully measured feedings") that, long term, will also damage the esophagus. I can only speculate about the kinds of developmental problems an infant may incur when he is stressed out over basic sustenance for the first weeks or months of key developmental milestones, but to me the choice was a no-brainer for the surgical option. I would do it again, even given this study, without hesitation.

The condition was Pyloric Stenosis.

The problem isn't the feeding itself, it's the rate of success; it's meaningfully lower. Similarly, it takes significantly longer to fix, yet the condition is relatively urgent as it results in malnutrition. Non-surgical intervention still occurs, but is generally reserved for cases where surgery is otherwise considered too risky.

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/937263-treatment

Maybe it's time to stop causing amnesia along with unconsciousness. They do that to keep people from having traumatic memories in case they wake up, but it's starting to seem like it causes more harm than good.

See: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/nightmares-after-th...

Unconsciousness and retrograde amnesia are two different things. If you're unconscious you're not going to have any memories. There are procedures where you are sedated and those are the ones they try to induce amnesia about the event.

From the abstract, it looks like an interesting paper to read but unfortunately, it's stuck behind a paywall and my searches have been unable to find a freely available copy.

A lot of research is still stuck behind paywalls. Ironically, the research is often publicly funded. My belief is that public research grants should be conditional on open publication.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/jan/17/open-acc...

Your taxes (if US citizen) paid for the research and it was peer reviewed for free by (I believe) academics in the public service but we all know the immense burden and expense involved in typesetting and publishing the results in print or on the internet. At least that is how it appears. The solution to this scandal lies with the researchers themselves.

The price of information http://www.economist.com/node/21545974

Where does it say that this research project was funded by the govt.? But I agree, important research, even if privately funded, ought to be freely available.

It's a safe assumption for essentially all biomedical research, but specifically, the senior author's website:

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/Labs/Ghetti/PWT/index.cfm?Sect...

It is a shame that life saving research sponsored by the govt. is locked down.

Not that it helps now, but within 12 months the article will be available here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24910347

NIH-funded researchers are required to deposit pre-proof manuscripts (text and images without final journal formatting) in the PubMed repository within 12 months. Often, this is facilitated by journals themselves as a checkbox in the submission system. (They provide this service in large part so that they can wait as long as possible to submit to PubMed)

If you are willing to post an email address, or someway to get it to you, I can get you the paper.

A paywall? I didn't get one. http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/vaop/naam/pdf/npp2014134a....

ah you found a link to it. excellent.

Interesting hypothesis. I've been lamenting, especially lately, my own memory problems identifying faces, scents, and sounds. My first surgery which had me placed under general anesthesia was at 1 yr.

I believe there are similar issues with children and x-rays to the head/brain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com