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The problem
Intervention: Early childhood exposure to general anesthesia
Who it was tested with: Children exposed to general anesthesia in early childhood, followed longitudinally to assess learning disabilities.
Children or communities are compared with a group that did not receive the intervention, or followed over years. This is the design that best separates what the intervention did from everything else that changed.
"Cohort studies reporting LD outcomes after early childhood GA exposure were included. Random-effects models were used to pool risk ratios (RRs)...The primary meta-analysis, restricted to three independent cohorts reporting clinically diagnosed learning disabilities (LDs), showed that early childhood exposure to general anesthesia (GA) was associated with an increased risk of subsequent LDs (RR = 1.23, 95% CI: 1.06-1.43)." This systematic review with meta-analysis synthesizes prospective cohort data to estimate associations between anesthesia exposure and learning disabilities, with subgroup analyses examining dose-response relationships.
Low certainty of evidence; residual confounding from underlying disease, surgical complexity, and hospitalization cannot be excluded; all cohorts comprised children born in 2000 or earlier, limiting applicability to current anesthesia practice; heterogeneity in outcome definitions and LD subtypes across studies
Across countries and designs
1 study · 0 countries
A reviewer checked the classification against the source.
claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · synth-v1
