“Does anesthesia cause brain damage?”

In my opinion, brain damage from administration of agents which cause general anesthesia is extremely rare when those agents are administered by people with the training to do it properly. These people are your Anesthesiologists, Anesthesia Assistants, and Nurse Anesthetists. Administration of anesthetic agents by other people who don't have the adequate training and certification to use them properly would be much more likely to cause brain damage or death.

There is no doubt anesthetic gases and intravenous sedatives, and even the anti-depressants people use daily are toxic to brain cells, specifically the neurons and glial cells.

Neurons, brain cells have ( with the proper nutrition, stress free environments ) tremendous restorative capacity, like all the other cells in your body. Growth hormone and IGF-1 are hormones secreted by the brain that are essential for brain cells to regenerate.

It’s unknown exactly if anesthetic gases cause brain damage. It’s very difficult to prove. What is important during general anesthesia is that the blood flow in the brain must be maintained during surgery and general anesthesia.

Good question; it’s difficult to answer specifically.

In case of uneventful anesthesia, there is no evidence that it causes permanent brain damage, however, there is evidence that in older patients, it can cause confusion and decrease brain intellectual function slightly. But in case of complications and difficulties in surgeries, it can cause delayed brain function recovery.