Perhaps you have a friend or a family member who becomes more forgetful after going through a procedure that requires anesthetics. It's also possible you experience it yourself.
These consequences are usually not accidental: one study shows that anesthetic does have impact to your memory, and it stretches longer than you'd expect.
A team of researchers from the University of Toronto published a study in Journal of Clinical Investigation on Monday, November 3. It links the reason why people who have been given anesthesia develop memory loss.
First, it's very important to understand why doctors give anesthetic to patients. Contrary to popular belief, it's not to make you sleep but to induce temporary coma, so you don't feel the pain while doctors and surgeons deal with your disease. In the process, it stimulates brain receptors that are responsible for memory loss.
Although the intention is good, the effects are something worth considering. Based on the experiments they conducted on healthy male mice, such memory loss may extend beyond the surgery. Some patients may suffer from it for days or even weeks.
Take, for example, the male mice. Researchers injected a low-dose anesthesia to these healthy lab mice for less than 30 minutes and observed the activity of the memory loss receptors, and they discovered they remained active for more than 3 days.
Because of the detrimental effects of the present anesthetic, they are currently working on creating drugs that may prevent the activation of these receptors and reverse memory loss.
In the meantime, they advise anyone who is going to undergo a surgical procedure to ask help from a friend or a family member in rememebering critical care information relayed by doctors. In fact, patients may have to take notes down.
While this issue varies among demographics, those who undergo more complex or huge surgical procedures like a heart bypass and people over 60 years old are more prone to prolonged memory loss due to anesthetics.
