by Sarah Lane
A new study conducted by the Mayo Clinic finds a link between multiple surgeries by the age of four and a higher risk for developing learning disabilities in reading, written language, and mathematics. Recent research indicating that anesthesia given at a young age can kill brain cells prompted Dr. Robert Wilder, an anesthesiologist at the Rochester, Minnesota, hospital to scour the records of more than 5,000 children who had been patients at Mayo or other facilities in Olmsted County, home of Mayo. Approximately 600 of those patients had …