Anesthesia After 40 Not Linked to Mental Decline Later

Mayo Clinic researchers followed more than 1,700 people in Minnesota, aged 70 to 89, who had normal mental function when the study began in 2004. About 85% of the participants had at least one surgery requiring general anesthesia after age 40. The study participants were evaluated every 15 months.

“The bottom line of our study is that we did not find an association between exposure to anesthesia for surgery and the development of mild cognitive [mental] impairment in these patients,” study senior author and anesthesiologist Dr. David Warner said in a Mayo news release.

Of the participants, 31% developed mild thinking and memory problems during the study period, but it was not associated with their anesthesia exposure, the researchers said.

The findings were published in the February issue of the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

A previous Mayo study found that older patients who receive anesthesia do not have an increased risk of dementia.

The investigators behind the new study are also examining how general anesthesia affects young children and have noted some associations between childhood anesthesia and learning and memory problems later in life.

“That by no means is established yet. Right now it’s just associations, and we and many other people are doing a lot of work to try to see if this really is a problem in children or not,” Warner said in the news release.

Fit at 50? Cardiac Arrest During Exercise Unlikely

Physically active middle-aged men and women have little chance of suffering cardiac arrest while playing sports, a new study suggests.

Researchers reviewed more than 1,200 cases of sudden cardiac arrest among adults aged 35 to 65. They found only 5% of attacks occurred during sports activity such as jogging or bicycling.

And the outcome for those patients was positive, the researchers said.

“When you take a closer look at those who have a sports-related cardiac arrest, they were more likely to survive than those whose cardiac arrest was not sports-related,” said lead researchers Dr. Sumeet Chugh, associate director of genomic cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles.

“Overall, the news is good. The risk of dying suddenly if you participate in sports is quite low,” Chugh said.
However, if you have a known heart problem, any heart symptoms or are a “total couch potato”, you might want to see your doctor before starting any significant sports activity, he added.

For the report, published April 6 in the journal Circulation, Chugh’s team reviewed almost 1,250 cases of sudden cardiac arrest among middle-aged adults from the Oregon Sudden Unexpected Death Study. Patient’s average age was 51.

Of the 5% of cases suffered during exercise, more than one-quarter took place while jogging. Basketball and cycling accounted for fewer than one in five sports-related cardiac arrests, the study found.