Anesthesia Exposure during Therapy Predicts Neurocognitive Outcomes in Survivors of Childhood Medulloblastoma

OBJECTIVE: To examine the contribution of anesthesia exposure during treatment for childhood medulloblastoma to neurocognitive outcomes 3 years after tumor diagnosis. STUDY DESIGN: In this retrospective study, anesthesia data were abstracted from medical records for 111 patients treated with risk-adapted protocol therapy at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Neurocognitive testing data were obtained for 90.9% of patients. RESULTS: For the 101 patients (62.4% male) who completed testing, mean age at diagnosis was 10.1 years and 74.3% were staged to have average-risk disease. Anesthesia exposure during treatment ranged from 1–52 events (mean = 19.9); mean cumulative duration per patient was 21.1 hours (range 0.7–59.7). Compared with normative expectations (16%), the group had a significantly higher frequency of at-risk scores (