Children are more likely than adults to remain awake during surgery despite being anaesthetised, according to Australian researchers.
In a two-year study, more than 850 children were questioned after being anaesthetised and 28 cases of suspected awareness were uncovered.
Four independent adjudicators agreed that of these, seven children — or almost one per cent — had been awake during their surgery.
Research team leader Andrew Davidson, from the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, said the incidence of adult awareness under anaesthetics was between 0,1 and 0,2%.
He told the Australian Associated Press that the children, selected at random, remembered things such as the noise of an orthopaedic saw.
”One having an ear tube insertion remembered the doctor making a hole in the eardrum and then sucking out the fluid inside the ear,” Davidson said.
”Another child having a needle popped in their hip remembered the feeling of the needle being poked around.”
Davidson, who reported the findings to a weekend meeting in Auckland of Australian and New Zealand anaesthetists, said it was one of the first major studies into children’s awareness.
He said he was ”very, very surprised” by the number who were awake.
”We’ve always assumed it doesn’t happen in children,” Davidson said.
”It may be … children just don’t tell anyone. They may be afraid to tell. I had one child who was aware who told her mother and her mother told her: ‘Don’t be stupid, that doesn’t happen’.”
Davidson said a couple of the children remembered being in pain during their surgery but this was not severe.
”It didn’t seem to make the children nearly as anxious as I expected it would,” he said. ”We followed the children up for a month. It didn’t seem to have an effect on their behaviour.”
Davidson said the study suggests anaesthetists may need to consider giving children more anaesthetic, although more studies
are under way. – Sapa-AFP