BACKGROUND Procedures such as venepuncture or heel prick are painful and may cause considerable stress to newborn infants. Topical local anaesthetics are effective for venepuncture but need to be applied for at least 60 min and the delivered dose will vary. We assessed a novel tetracaine-based self-adhesive patch in providing controlled local anaesthesia before venepuncture. METHODS A placebo...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE To evaluate the level of pain during phacoemulsification and foldable intraocular lens implantation under instillation of tetracaine 0.5% eyedrops versus a combination of lidocaine 2% gel and instillation of tetracaine eyedrops. METHODS This prospective, randomized, controlled study included 51 patients undergoing phacoemulsification under topical anesthesia. They wer...

A simple, fast, and sensitive capillary electrophoresis method was developed for the simultaneous determination of tetracaine, proline, and enoxacin in human urine with electrochemiluminescence (ECL) detection. The effects of experimental conditions including the mode of applied voltage signal, the potential of working electrode, pH value, the flow rate of carrier of solution, the concentration...

There are some differences in cytotoxic actions between local anesthetics. In a study performed using rat thymocytes, lidocaine increased intracellular Zn concentration whereas tetracaine decreased it. However, thymocytes are not subject to local anesthetics. This study was conducted to confirm the actions of tetracaine and lidocaine on neurons. Tetracaine and lidocaine changed intracellular Zn...

Local anesthetics are a diverse group of clinically useful compounds that act as pore blockers of both voltage- and cyclic nucleotide-gated (CNG) ion channels. We used the local anesthetic tetracaine to probe the nature of the conformational change that occurs in the pore of CNG channels during the opening allosteric transition. When applied to the intracellular side of wild-type rod CNG channe...

BACKGROUND Arterial catheterization is painful and is associated with patient stress and anxiety. Analgesia is usually provided by subcutaneous injection of local anaesthetic. An alternative is topical anaesthesia, such as Rapydan which is a novel topical anaesthetic patch containing 70 mg each of lidocaine and tetracaine. We therefore tested the hypothesis that Rapydan patch analgesia is non-i...

Charge movement was measured in frog cut twitch fibers with the double Vaseline-gap technique. 25 microM tetracaine had very little effect on the maximum amounts of Q beta and Q gamma but slowed the kinetics of the I gamma humps in the ON segments of TEST-minus-CONTROL current traces, giving rise to biphasic transients in the difference traces. This concentration of tetracaine also shifted V ga...

BACKGROUND The intraocular pressures and biomechanical parameters measured by the ocular response analyzer make the analyzer a useful tool for the diagnosis and management of anterior segment disease. This observational study was designed to investigate the effect of topical anesthesia on the parameters measured by the ocular response analyzer: corneal hysteresis, corneal resistance factor, Gol...

We tested the hypothesis that membrane lipid composition influences drug action at membrane proteins by studying local anesthetic action at the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR). Infrared difference spectra show that concentrations of tetracaine consistent with binding to the ion channel (<50 microM) stabilize a resting-like state when the nAChR is reconstituted into phosphatidylcholine ...

PURPOSE A major disadvantage of photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) is pain and discomfort in the first three postoperative days. We tried to assess the efficacy and safety to the cornea of a limited amount of topical tetracaine given to patients for use when needed to manage severe pain. METHODS Sixty-nine eyes of 49 patients who underwent PRK between June 21, 1996 and June 15, 1998 by a singl...