Children who undergo surgery before 3 years and are exposed to general anesthesia, have a double risk of behavioral or developmental problems than other children.

According to lead author Charles DiMaggio, an assistant professor of clinical epidemiology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons' Mailman School of Public Health in New York City,"There really is no hard evidence that there is any causal association between anesthesia and developmental outcomes in children, though research in rat models indicates that there may be some association between the types of anesthesia and neuronal [brain cell] level changes. The early concern is, could these data be extrapolated to humans?"

A study was conducted on 625 children under the age of 3 who had surgery under general anesthesia. These children were compared to 5000 randomly selected children. It was found that about 4.8% of the children exposed to anesthesia and 1.5% of the normal group were diagnosed with a developmental or behavioral disorder.

However, Dr. Peter Davis, anesthesiologist-in-chief at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh counters the claim by saying"This is an important study, but there are a lot of confounding variables.What exactly are we talking about? Are these kids who wet the bed? Kids who don't do well in school? Kids with behavioral problems? And, are there factors the researchers couldn't sift out from a database? Did all of these kids get the same level of prenatal care? How has their socioeconomic status changed from year to year? Did they all get the same anesthesia agents? I'm not sure the complete story is quite here yet."