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Risks with general anaesthesia
General anaesthesia redefined surgery and medicine, but over a century later it still carries significant risks.
- Too much sedation can lead to neurocognitive disorders and may even shorten lifespan;
- Too little can lead to traumatic and painful wakefulness during surgery.
Generally speaking, anaesthetic drugs render people unconscious by changing how parts of the brain communicate. But scientists still don’t fully understand why.
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General anaesthesia redefined surgery
Dentist William Morton performed the first successful public test of a general anaesthetic in 1846. He first experimented on a hen, his dog, his goldfish, and himself before going to the Massachusetts General Hospital surgical theatre.
His concoction of sulfuric ether and oil from an orange...
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Signal to noise
In 2011, renowned anesthesiologist Emery Brown began using EEG to track patients’ brain waves.EEG records the electrochemical activity between communicating neurons in the brain.
During general anaesthesia, you can see, based on the patterns on the EEG monitor, how unconscious someone is, ...
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Usefulness of anaesthesia
Understanding how patients wake from anaesthesia and under what circumstances they struggle could also help scientists with how to treat disorders of consciousness, including coma.
Researchers can use general anaesthesia to control the transition into and out of unconsciousness. Like anaes...
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Negative effects of anaesthetic
- 17 to 43 percent of patients may have cognitive problems such as memory and executive functions that typically last for up to two weeks. However, delirium in adults over 65 can last for several months.
- Some studies have shown that the risk of long-term cognitive damage and post-op d...
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