Using Neuroimaging to Study the Effects of Pain, Analgesia, and Anesthesia on Brain Development

Neuroimaging has been increasingly used as a modality to study the impact of pain, analgesia, and anesthetics on pediatric neurodevelopment. The sixth biennial Pediatric Anesthesia Neurodevelopmental Assessment (PANDA) Symposium addressed the 2016 US Food and Drug Administration drug safety warning regarding the potential neurotoxic effects of commonly used anesthetic and sedative medications in children, and included a session discussing the use of various neuroimaging techniques, to detect structural, metabolic, and functional brain changes that can occur with exposure to pain and to anesthetic medications. The presenters concluded that advanced multimodal magnetic resonance imaging techniques are useful in detecting the aforementioned changes, which were found to be pain-specific and anesthetic agent-specific.