Samaire Armstrong Nud

Los secretos de la anestesia

NEUROLOGY

Valerio

'The New England Journal of Medicine' reviews the latest findings on this issue.

Emery Brown and his team, the department of anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital (USA), one of the most important medical centers in the world, r EPAs recent advances in the science of sleep and neuroscience to try to uncover new clues about the general anesthesia.

In fact, comparing the patterns of electrical activity occurring in the brain under anesthesia during sleep or coma, and ensure that general anesthesia is more like (cerebrally speaking) a coma-like sleep often imagine. "Until now, the anesthesiologists were reluctant to make the comparison with the point that a term was considered too hard, but it really has to be something so deep, how else could we operate on someone?

"asks Brown.

In his review, Brown and colleagues also discuss how certain anesthetic drugs act to achieve the state of unconsciousness, amnesia, lack of pain perception and immobility that characterizes the general anesthesia. "It's a very well done review shows that increasing our knowledge of biochemical bases

and receivers on acting anesthesia," explains Dr. Fernando Gilsanz ELMUNDO.es, head of the anesthesia La Paz Hospital in Madrid . For example, it is curious that ketamine, which mechanism actually causes excitation of neurons, is used for 'sleep' the patient on the operating table. Although, as explained in his article, what happens is that ketamine causes actually an activity that causes excess an effect similar to a chaotic and disorganized delivery of information and data on a computer just crashing the system.

And, as subtly criticize their colleagues, "many anesthesiologists know how to induce and maintain their patients in the state needed to operate, but are not familiar with the basic neural mechanisms that allow them to out their work. " And add the fact that anesthesia leads to the brain to a state as deep as the coma could explain, for example, why some patients take hours to wake

intervention, or why patients elderly may have some cognitive sequelae maintained along for months. In short, "better understanding of the sleep and coma may lead to new ways of antesia based on other ways to alter the level of consciousness, and to provide analgesia and muscle relaxation necessary." Source