Serious risk of increase according to this study.
Exposure to anesthesia has been linked to a 35 percent increase of dementia in patients over age 65, according to a new study.
Researchers reviewed the medical information of
9,294 French patients over the age of 65. The patients were interviewed several
times over a ten year period to determine their cognitive status.
After two years, 33 percent of participants had
been exposed to anesthesia. Most of
the exposed patients (19 percent overall)
were exposed
to general anesthesia — a medically induced coma. The rest
were exposed to local/locoregional — any technique to
relieve pain in the body — anesthesia.
In total, 632 participants developed dementia eight
years after the study began. A majority of these patients, 512, were diagnosed
with probable or possible Alzheimer’s disease. The remainder had
non-Alzheimer’s dementia.
The
gap between dementia related to general anesthesia (22 percent) and
non-dementia patients (19 percent) was associated with a 35 percent increased
risk of developing dementia. This risk was linked to at least one general
anesthesia.
“Elderly patients are at an increased
risk for complications following anesthesia and surgery,” said
Jeffrey H. Silverstein, MD, MS, and vice chair for research at the Department
of Anesthesiology at Mount Sinai in New York City. “[They] are particularly
prone to postoperative delirium, which is a loss of orientation and
attention. Anesthesiologists have been evaluating higher cognitive
functions (for example, memory and executive processing) and found that a
substantial number have decreases in one or more of these areas after a
surgical procedure.”
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