Introduction The phrase “balanced anesthesia” originated from the coadministration of drugs to produce an “ideal” anesthetic state. Today the ideal anesthetic state implies adequate hypnosis, analgesia, muscle relaxation, and relief from stress. The last of these attributes, relief from stress, has been the focus of several investigations conducted in horses in order to determine the magnitude ...

background: target-controlled infusion is a new delivery system for intravenous anesthetic agents with which the anesthetist targets a plasma or effect-site drug concentration to achieve a predetermined effect. with this system, the tedious task of calculating the amount of administered drug required to achieve the target concentration is left in charge of a microprocessor which commands the in...

Perioperative seizures have numerous potential etiologies. In general, when seizures occur during surgery, their onset often coincides with the introduction of a specific anesthetic or analgesic drug. Conversely, postoperative seizures are more commonly due to nonanesthetic causes. However, there have been reports of postoperative convulsions that appeared to be caused by anesthetic or analgesi...

Experimental studies have shown that general anesthetics may cause a variety of morphological changes in developing immature brain of laboratory animals (1). Additionally, there is some evidence that longterm and prolonged exposure may be worse than short-term exposure in some animal species (2,3). However, the relevance of these findings in human beings is currently unknown (4,5) and studies h...

The nature and mechanism of human consciousness is emerging as one of the most important scientific and philosophical questions of the 21st century. Disregarded as a subject of serious inquiry throughout most of the 20th century, it has now regained legitimacy as a scientific endeavor. The investigation of consciousness and the mechanisms of general anesthesia have begun to converge. In the pre...