A new research has come out with a finding that while anaesthetics help patients undergo critical surgery, they would also result in long-term cognitive impairment such as memory loss.
Factors such as age, health, type of surgery and anaesthetics, would enhance when more intricate procedures are carried out, the researchers said.

Anaesthetics activate memory-loss receptors in the brain, ensuring that patients do not remember traumatic events during surgery and the researchers found that the activity of memory loss receptors remains long after the drugs have left the patient's system.

Patients and even many doctors claim that anesthetics do not bear long term consequences. New research provides us with an assumption that how these drugs work is wrong, as per Beverley Orser, professor at the University of Toronto in Canada.
Half of the patients, who undergo anaesthesia and surgery, would experience some sort of cognitive impairment for example, memory loss- at hospital discharge and one tenth of the sufferers still suffer from cognitive impairments three months later.

"Anesthetics do not put you to sleep – they induce a pharmacological coma. We shouldn't take these drugs lightly," Orser concluded. The study was published today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.