Multiple exposures to anaesthesia may affect your child’s memory

Agencies

June 1, 2017

Jun 1: A recent study has found that repeated exposure to a common anaesthesia drug early in life results in visual recognition memory impairment, which emerges after the first year of life and may persist long-term. child

The research from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is among the first to address the question of whether repeated postnatal anaesthesia exposure, in and of itself, results in memory impairment in a highly translationally relevant rhesus monkey model.

Rhesus monkeys at birth are at a stage of neurodevelopment that is more similar to that of human infants than are neonatal rodents; with respect to brain growth, a six-week-old rhesus monkey corresponds to a human 6 to 12 months of age.

Because these kinds of controlled studies cannot be carried out in humans, it is essential to use a comparable animal model to discover if anaesthesia is affecting the brain. Unlike previous research, the study was conducted in the absence of a surgical procedure, co-morbidities that may necessitate surgical intervention, or the psychological stress associated with illness.

“The major strength of this study is its ability to separate anaesthesia exposure from surgical procedures, which is a potential complication in the studies conducted in children,” said researcher Mark Baxter. “Our results confirm that multiple anaesthesia exposures alone result in memory impairment in a highly translational animal model. Interestingly, the anaesthesia-exposed group had normal visual memory at six months of age. Visual memory impairment didn’t emerge until the second year of life, corresponding roughly to the age of three to six years old in humans.”

Specifically, the study team exposed 10 non-human primate subjects to a common paediatric aesthetic called sevoflurane for four hours, the length of time required for a significant surgical procedure in humans. They were exposed to the aesthetic at postnatal day 7 and then again two and four weeks later, because human data indicate that repeated anaesthesia results in a greater risk of cognitive disability relative to a single aesthetic exposure.

They found the anaesthesia-exposed infants displayed no memory impairment when tested at 6-10 months, but demonstrated significant memory impairment (reduced time looking at the novel image) after the first year of life compared with the control group.

This primate model may be used by researchers for future studies to develop a new aesthetic agent or prophylactic treatment to counteract the impact of anaesthesia on behaviour in children. The findings also suggest that additional work is required to identify the mechanisms by which anaesthetics may cause long-term changes in central nervous system function that impact behaviour.

The study is published in The British Journal of Anaesthesia.

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Alzheimer can spread it roots if you lose even one night's sleep!

Agencies

January 12,2020

Washington D.C., Jan 12: Disruption in one night's sleep can lead to getting Alzheimer's disease, a recent study has stated.

The interruption in the sound sleep for a single night aggravates the level of tau protein in any young male's body, thus gives rise to the chances of developing the disease.

According to CNN, the report was published on Wednesday in neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

"Our study focuses on the fact that even in young, healthy individuals, missing one night of sleep increases the level of tau in blood suggesting that over time, such sleep deprivation could possibly have detrimental effects," says study author Dr Jonathan Cedernaes, a neurologist at Uppsala University in Sweden.

As defined by the Alzheimer's Association, tau is the name of a protein that helps in stabilizing the internal structure of the brain's nerve cells. An abnormal build-up of tau protein in the body can end up in causing interior cells to fall apart and eventually developing Alzheimer's.

"When you get more of that deep sleep and you get the REM sleep in the normal amounts, that improves clearance of abnormal proteins which we think is good," said Mayo Clinic neurologist Dr Donn Dexter, not the study author but a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology.

Earlier studies have also shown that getting deprived of sleep can allow higher tau development and accumulation. Thus that poor sleep can hasten the development of cognitive issues.

Researchers caution that the study is small and inconclusive, and acknowledged they were not able to determine what the increased levels might mean.

"This study raises more questions than answers," agreed Dexter on a concluding note, sharing, "What this is telling us is that we have to dig more deeply. Despite something we do for a third of our lives, we know so little about sleep and we're learning every day, particularly when it comes to sleep and dementia."

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Multiple courses of antibiotics can make people more sick

Agencies

March 3,2020

Taking multiple courses of antibiotics within a short span of time may do people more harm than good, suggests new research which discovered an association between the number of prescriptions for antibiotics and a higher risk of hospital admissions.

Patients who have had 9 or more antibiotic prescriptions for common infections in the previous three years are 2.26 times more likely to go to hospital with another infection in three or more months, said the researchers.

Patients who had two antibiotic prescriptions were 1.23 times more likely, patients who had three to four prescriptions 1.33 times more likely and patients who had five to eight 1.77 times more likely to go to hospital with another infection.

"We don't know why this is, but overuse of antibiotics might kill the good bacteria in the gut (microbiota) and make us more susceptible to infections, for example," said Professor Tjeerd van Staa from the University of Manchester in Britain.

The study, published in the journal BMC Medicine, is based on the data of two million patients in England and Wales.

The patient records, from 2000 to 2016, covered common infections such as upper respiratory tract, urinary tract, ear and chest infections and excluded long term conditions such as cystic fibrosis and chronic lung disease.

The risks of going to hospital with another infection were related to the number of the antibiotic prescriptions in the previous three years.

A course is defined by the team as being given over a period of one or two weeks.

"GPs (general physicians) care about their patients, and over recent years have worked hard to reduce the prescribing of antibiotics,""Staa said.

"But it is clear GPs do not have the tools to prescribe antibiotics effectively for common infections, especially when patients already have previously used antibiotics.

"They may prescribe numerous courses of antibiotics over several years, which according to our study increases the risk of a more serious infection. That in turn, we show, is linked to hospital admissions," Staa added.

It not clear why hospital admissions are linked to higher prescriptions and research is needed to show what or if any biological factors exist, said the research team.

"Our hope is that, however, a tool we are working for GPs, based on patient history, will be able to calculate the risks associated with taking multiple courses of antibiotics," said Francine Jury from the University of Manchester.

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