Having Your Tonsils Out as a Child May Have a Drastic Impact on Your Life
In the US alone, around 300,000 children each year have their tonsils surgically removed to improve breathing while sleeping or reduce recurrent infection.
A study by an international team of researchers now suggests this relatively common procedure could increase a patient's risk of developing an anxiety-related disorder later in life.
Scientists Guangxi Medical University in China and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden analyzed data on over a million people held in a Swedish health registry, finding that a tonsillectomy was linked to a 43 percent increased risk of developing conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, or anxiety.
Being an observational study, the research can't determine the cause of this outcome, however the increased risk was present even after accounting for the sex of the participants, the age at which they had their tonsils out, any family history of stress-related disorders, and the education level of the parents (an indicator of socioeconomic status).
"These findings suggest a potential role of adenotonsillar diseases or associated health conditions in the development of stress-related disorders," the researchers write in their published paper.
