Abstract
We would like to thank both Ing et al. and Drs. Williams and Sartorelli for their thoughtful comments on our recent Editorial, “GAS, PANDA, and MASK: No Evidence of Clinical Anesthetic Neurotoxicity!” We address their concerns in turn below.
Developmental anesthesia neurotoxicity is probably one of the most debated and controversial issues of the past 2 decades in pediatric perioperative care. The comments of Ing et al. are a perfect demonstration of how interpretation of any data on this topic can vary even among those individuals who have been working on this field for a long time. The most plausible explanation for this strong divergence in opinions regarding the clinical implication of the already existing data stems from the important and probably unsolvable limitation of both experimental and clinical studies in this domain. In the following lines, we address the three lines of thoughts raised by Ing et al.