OUR OBSERVATION IN GENERAL ANESTHESIA

General anesthesia

As anyone who has looked at a petunia or a pansy can testify, plants generate flowers with characteristic numbers and patterns of organs. The floral organs are derived from a pool of stem cells called the floral meristem. In wild-type Arabidopsis thaliana flowers (shown at lower left) the meristem gives rise to four sepals that enclose the bud, four white petals, six pollen-bearing stamens and ...

Metastability of Neuronal Dynamics during General Anesthesia: Time for a Change in Our Assumptions?

There is strong evidence that anesthetics have stereotypical effects on brain state, so that a given anesthetic appears to have a signature in the electroencephalogram (EEG), which may vary with dose. This can be usefully interpreted as the anesthetic determining an attractor in the phase space of the brain. How brain activity shifts between these attractors in time remains understudied, as mos...

Anisocoria under general anesthesia with Propofol

Anisocoria during anesthesia is very rare, but may indicate life-threatening neurologic injuries and create tremendous condition. A 23-year-old male patient was anesthetized with fentanyl and propofol. Thirty minutes after inducing anesthesia, unilateral mydriasis was detected. The duration of surgery was shortened for prompt evaluation of the pupils. At the end of the operation neither vision ...

Venous Pressure in General Anesthesia.

Mechanisms of general anesthesia.

Although general anesthetics are often said to be nonspecific agents, it is likely that they act at a much more restricted set of target sites than commonly believed. The traditional view has been that the primary targets are lipid portions of nerve membranes, but recent evidence shows that the effects on lipid bilayers of clinically relevant levels of anesthetics are very small. Effects on mos...