During the Fifth Pediatric Anesthesia Neurodevelopmental Assessment Symposium, experts and stakeholders met to present and discuss recent advances made in the study of neurodevelopmental outcomes after exposure to anesthetic drugs in infants and children. This article summarizes the update of 5 ongoing clinical studies: General Anesthesia compared to Spinal Anesthesia, Toxicity of Remifentanil and Dexmedetomidine, Mayo Anesthesia Safety in Kids, the University of California San Francisco human cohort study, and Columbia University Medical Center Neonatal Magnetic Resonance Imaging study. The purpose of this summary is to discuss the contributions and limitations of these studies, how they fit into the published literature, and what questions remain to be answered.
Departments of *Anesthesiology
#Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY
Departments of †Anesthesiology
‡Pediatrics, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, MN
§Department of Anesthesiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
∥Department of Anesthesiology and Department of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX
¶Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Care, University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, San Francisco, CA
C.I. is supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) under award number K08HS022941. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the AHRQ.
The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Address correspondence to: Teeda Pinyavat, MD, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, 622 West 168th Street BHN4-440, New York, NY 10032 (e-mail: tp2008@cumc.columbia.edu).
Received July 8, 2016
Accepted July 11, 2016
