The accidental overdose of local anesthetics may prove fatal. The commonly used amide local anesthetics have varying adverse effects on the myocardium, and beyond a certain dose all are capable of causing death. Local anesthetics are the most frequently used drugs amongst anesthetists and although uncommon, local anaesthetic systemic toxicity accounts for a high proportion of mortality, with lo...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The use of volatile anesthetics in cardiac surgery is not recent. Since the introduction of halothane in clinical practice, several cardiac surgery centers started to use these anesthetics constantly. CONTENT In the last years a great number of studies have shown that the volatile anesthetics have a protecting effect against myocardial ischemic dysfunction. Experimen...

The interaction of four inhalational anesthetics (sevoflurane, isoflurane, enflurane and halothane) with pancuronium and vecuronium and also their prejunctional actions at the neuromuscular junction were quantitatively studied using rat phrenic nerve-hemidiaphragm preparations. To investigate the prejunctional effects of inhalational anesthetics, a train-of-four ratio (T4/T1) and the tetanus ra...

Status of individual animals is often shown in pigmentation. For instance, stress responsiveness is associated with melanin-based pigmentation in vertebrates in general. This pattern is evident in Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) and rainbow trout (Onchorhynchus mykiss) with melanin-based spots indicating stress coping style. Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus) differ from other salmonids in pigment...

BACKGROUND Water undergoes structural change as it interfaces with hydrophilic surfaces, including the many hydrophilic surfaces within the cell. This interfacial water has become known as "Exclusion Zone (EZ) water" or "fourth-phase water" [1]. METHODS We tested the hypothesis that anesthetics diminish the amount of EZ water, and that this change may correlate with functional changes in anes...

Background: T-type calcium channels regulate neuronal membrane excitability and participate in a number of physiologic and pathologic processes in the central nervous system, including sleep and epileptic activity. Volatile anesthetics inhibit native and recombinant T-type calcium channels at concentrations comparable to those required to produce anesthesia. To determine whether T-type calcium ...

The mechanism and site(s) of action of volatile anesthetics are unknown. In all organisms studied, volatile anesthetics adhere to the Meyer-Overton relationship--that is, a ln-ln plot of the oil-gas partition coefficients versus the potencies yields a straight line with a slope of -1. This relationship has led to two conclusions about the site of action of volatile anesthetics. (i) It has prope...

PURPOSE The determination of intraocular pressure (IOP) by noncontact tonometry (NCT) has been reported to be affected by central corneal thickness (CCT) and by the instillation of topical anesthetics. METHODS In order to determine the influence of topical anesthetics on CCT and IOP measured by NCT, 80 eyes from 49 patients were examined before and after the instillation of topical anesthetic...

There are various experimental studies regarding the toxicity and the time of action of local anesthetics, which contain general insights about their pharmacological and physicochemical properties. Although a detailed microscopic analysis of the local anesthetics would contribute to understanding these properties, there are relatively few theoretical studies about these molecules. In this artic...