STUDY ADVISES ANESTHESIA FOR NEWBORNS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, January 2, 1992                   TAG: 9201020047
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BOSTON                                LENGTH: Short
STUDY ADVISES ANESTHESIA FOR NEWBORNS
Using deep anesthesia to protect newborns from pain during surgery appears to dramatically improve their chance of surviving, and doctors should drop the common practice of minimizing the use of anesthetics for their tiniest patients, a new study concludes.
Researchers found that the stress of surgical pain, even if young patients are unconscious, seems to significantly increase the hazards of operations.
Traditionally, doctors have used anesthesia and pain killers sparingly on babies. They feared that these substances were dangerous because they would suppress the infants' blood pressure.
Infants once routinely underwent surgery without any anesthetics at all. Many doctors believed babies did not feel pain in the same way adults do.
Experts now realize that infants do suffer pain. And since the early 1980s, synthetic medical narcotics have been available to provide deep anesthesia safely for infants, even babies a few days old.
But because of lingering fears of harm, many doctors continue to anesthetize babies only lightly during surgery. While the babies are unconscious, their bodies feel pain and react to it.
The new study, published in today's New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that withholding complete pain relief is dangerous because the stress of pain appears to make operations even riskier.
The study, conducted from 1987 to 1990 on newborns undergoing heart operations, was performed by Drs. Sunny Anand of Massachusetts General Hospital and Paul R. Hickey of Children's Hospital, both in Boston.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB