NLRP3 and Cognitive impairment: Furthermore, preliminary experimental findings have suggested that NLRP3 inflammasome activation was linked to cognitive impairment after isoflurane anesthesia and isoflurane exposure induced the upregulation of NLRP3 and subsequently increased the level of IL-1β in the hippocampus of aged mice (Li et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2018).