For further information, contact Melissa Maimann at Essential Birth Consulting.
Anesthesia during a cesarean delivery is not associated with an increased risk of learning disabilities compared with vaginal birth …
The finding … suggests that brief exposure to anesthetics during birth has no long-term neurodevelopmental consequences … in an unexpected finding, regional anesthesia during cesarean was associated with a lower risk of learning disabilities compared with vaginal birth …
One possible explanation for that … is that cesarean delivery with regional anesthesia “attenuates the neonatal stress response to vaginal delivery that in turn has significant effects on later neural development.”
… The issue has been of concern, since animal studies have shown that anesthetics can cause degenerative changes when applied to the young brain.
… Among those delivered vaginally, the cumulative incidence of learning disabilities was 20.8%, compared with 19.4% for those whose mothers received general anesthesia for cesarean delivery and 15.4% for those whose mothers had a regional anesthetic for cesarean delivery.
… the pairwise comparison of vaginal birth with cesarean delivery and regional anesthetic yielded a hazard ratio of 0.73, which was significant at P=0.046.
Melissa Maimann, Essential Birth Consulting 0400 418 448