International Anesthesia Research Society

Transcription

This message is brought to you by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. [Music] Parents may face no more difficult decision than whether their young child should have surgery, including whether the child should be put under general anesthesia. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is committed to providing parents and doctors the information they need when faced with that decision. To do just that, the FDA and the International Anesthesia Research Society recently entered into a partnership called SmartTots. SmartTots will coordinate and fund research into making anesthesia safer for infants and young children. Children need surgery. The goal of this research is to determine how to use anesthesia most safely in these young infants and children and how to avoid any safety problems. SmartTots will help find additional funding and support for research into the effects of anesthetic drugs on the development of children under the age of four. SmartTots will also research the impact of drug type, dosage amounts, and number of exposures. This research will help determine if any particular anesthetic drugs pose hazards to young children; be used to design the safest anesthetic regimes; and potentially foster development of new anesthetic drugs. Every time you get anesthesia in surgery, there's a risk. But this may be a special risk for children under the age of four. That's obviously a really important time for development of kids' brains. What SmartTots does is it allows us to learn how to give anesthesia and do surgery absolutely safely for these children under the age of four. There are no studies that show any harm to young children exposed to anesthesia. But, recent studies have shown an urgent need for research into the potential risks of anesthesia on the development of children under the age of four. The animal studies that were done by university scientists and also that were done by FDA showed that exposure of young animals or newborn animals to anesthetic agents can cause neurologic problems, both lesions in the brain or behavioral problems, developmental problems later in life. Therefore, it's urgent for us to determine whether or not that same phenomenon happens in human infants. Doctors perform surgery on children when it's essential to their health. So, it's not always possible to avoid surgery for children based on the potential risks of anesthesia. If you could postpone surgery under the age of four, that would be fine. But for most procedures, you can't delay them, because it's important for the kids' development and health. Those surgeries can be life-saving or they can be life-altering, and they're medically needed. SmartTots will help parents and doctors better understand the risks of anesthesia, helping them make better decisions about the need for surgery. The reason we have this foundation is because there is no one else who can provide money to do the necessary research to find out how to make it absolutely safe. We need your support. To find out more about SmartTots and how you can help, please visit www.smarttots.org. So that we can all be confident that children who have to undergo surgery and have anesthesia will be safe. [Music]