• Anesthesiology · Jun 2019

    Review

    Understanding the Effects of General Anesthetics on Cortical Network Activity Using Ex Vivo Preparations.

    • Logan J Voss, Paul S García, Harald Hentschke, and Matthew I Banks.
    • From the Department of Anaesthesia, Waikato District Health Board, Hamilton, New Zealand (L.J.V.) the Department of Anesthesiology, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia (P.S.G) Anesthesiology and Research Divisions, Atlanta Veterans Administration Medical Center, Atlanta, Georgia (P.S.G.) the Experimental Anesthesiology Section, Department of Anesthesiology, University Hospital of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany (H.H.) rthe Department of Anesthesiology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin (M.I.B.).
    • Anesthesiology. 2019 Jun 1; 130 (6): 104910631049-1063.

    AbstractGeneral anesthetics have been used to ablate consciousness during surgery for more than 150 yr. Despite significant advances in our understanding of their molecular-level pharmacologic effects, comparatively little is known about how anesthetics alter brain dynamics to cause unconsciousness. Consequently, while anesthesia practice is now routine and safe, there are many vagaries that remain unexplained. In this paper, the authors review the evidence that cortical network activity is particularly sensitive to general anesthetics, and suggest that disruption to communication in, and/or among, cortical brain regions is a common mechanism of anesthesia that ultimately produces loss of consciousness. The authors review data from acute brain slices and organotypic cultures showing that anesthetics with differing molecular mechanisms of action share in common the ability to impair neurophysiologic communication. While many questions remain, together, ex vivo and in vivo investigations suggest that a unified understanding of both clinical anesthesia and the neural basis of consciousness is attainable.

      Pubmed     Free full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…