Science / Medicine : Deep Anesthesia Boosts Infant Survival in Surgery

Using deep anesthesia to protect newborns from pain during surgery appears to dramatically improve their chance of surviving, and doctors should drop the common practice of minimizing the use of anesthetics for their tiniest patients, a new study concludes.

Researchers found that the stress of surgical pain, even if young patients are unconscious, seems to significantly increase the hazards of operations.

Traditionally, doctors have used anesthesia and painkillers sparingly on babies. They feared that these substances were dangerous because they would suppress the infants’ blood pressure.

Experts now realize that infants suffer pain. Since the early 1980s, synthetic medical narcotics have been available to provide deep anesthesia safely for infants, even babies a few days old. The new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that withholding complete pain relief is dangerous because the stress of pain appears to make operations even riskier.

The study, conducted from 1987 to 1990 on newborns undergoing heart operations, was performed by Dr. Sunny Anand of Massachusetts General Hospital and Dr. Paul R. Hickey of Children’s Hospital in Boston. They compared standard light anesthesia with deep anesthesia that protected babies from pain during surgery and kept them unconscious for a day afterward. To the doctors’ surprise, the 30 babies receiving deep anesthesia recovered much better. All of them survived, while four of the 15 babies getting standard light anesthesia died after surgery.