Anesthesia and analgesia
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The neuromuscular effect of neostigmine, 1.25 mg/70 kg, was assessed in 40 adult patients 10 min after cessation of a succinylcholine infusion. The patients had received a thiopental-nitrous oxide anesthetic supplemented by halothane or fentanyl during which they were given at least 5 mg/kg succinylcholine over more than 90 min. Train-of-four monitoring was used. ⋯ The degree of recovery was directly related to the train-of-four ratio, and the results in patients who had received halothane were no different from those who had received fentanyl. The findings are compatible with the hypothesis that phase I block depends upon the presence of circulating succinylcholine and decreases as the latter is cleared, whereas phase II block decreases more slowly. Thus succinylcholine block can be antagonized by neostigmine if enough time is allowed for phase I block to disappear and for a pure phase II block to be present.
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Anesthesia and analgesia · Aug 1985
Decreased sensitivity to metocurine in patients with upper motoneuron disease.
Responses to the nondepolarizing muscle relaxant, metocurine, were studied in eight hemiplegic and eight unmatched patients with normal motor strength during the general anesthetic given for various neurosurgical operations. Metocurine, 0.3 mg/kg, was administered intravenously, and indirectly evoked thumb twitch tensions were measured on both sides in the hemiplegic patients, and on one side in the normal patients. Arterial blood samples were obtained as twitch tension was recovering, and serum metocurine concentrations were determined using a specific radioimmunoassay. ⋯ We were, however, unable to detect any significant deviation from parallelism among the three regression lines. We also measured time to 50% return of single twitch height for each data group as follows (mean +/- SEM: for NMS patients, 242 +/- 73 min; for the unaffected arm of hemiplegic patients, 116 +/- 60 min; and for the affected arm of hemiplegic patients, 59 +/- 36 min. By ANOVA and the Bonferroni test, each value was different from the other at P less than or equal to 0.01.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)