Anesthesia

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Anesthesia or anaesthesia (from Greek "without sensation") is a state of controlled, temporary loss of sensation or awareness that is induced for medical purposes. It may include analgesia (relief from or prevention of pain), paralysis (muscle relaxation), amnesia (loss of memory), or unconsciousness. A patient under the effects of anesthetic drugs is referred to as being anesthetized.

Anesthesia enables the painless performance of medical procedure that would otherwise cause severe or intolerable pain to an unanesthetized patient, or would otherwise be technically unfeasible.

 Three broad categories of anesthesia exist

General anesthesia suppresses central nervous system activity and results in unconsciousness and total lack of sensation. A patient receiving general anesthesia can lose consciousness with either intravenous agents or inhalation agents.

Sedation suppresses the central nervous system to a lesser degree, inhibiting both anxiety and creation of long-term memories without resulting in unconsciousness.

Regional and local anesthesia, which blocks transmission of nerve impulses from a specific part of the body. Depending on the situation, this may be used either on its own (in which case the patient remains conscious), or in combination with general anesthesia or sedation. Drugs can be targeted at peripheral nerves to anesthetize an isolated part of the body only, such as numbing a tooth for dental work or using a nerve block to inhibit sensation in an entire limb. Alternatively, epidural, spinal anesthesia, or a combined technique can be performed in the region of the central nervous system itself, suppressing all incoming sensation from nerves outside the area of the block.

In preparing for a medical procedure, the clinician chooses one or more drugs to achieve the types and degree of anesthesia characteristics appropriate for the type of procedure and the particular patient. The types of drugs used include general anesthetics, local anesthetics, hypnotics, sedatives, neuromuscular-blocking drugs, narcotics, and analgesics.

The risks of complications during or after anesthesia are often difficult to separate from those of the procedure for which anesthesia is being given, but in the main they are related to three factors: the health of the patient, the complexity (and stress) of the procedure itself, and the anaesthetic technique. Of these factors, the health of the patient has the greatest impact. Major perioperative risks can include death, heart attack, and pulmonary embolism whereas minor risks can include postoperative nausea and vomiting and hospital readmission. Some conditions, like local anesthetic toxicity, airway trauma or malignant hyperthermia, can be more directly attributed to specific anesthetic drugs and techniques.

Medical uses

The purpose of anesthesia can be distilled down to three basic goals or endpoints.

•             Hypnosis (a temporary loss of consciousness and with it a loss of memory. In a pharmacological context, the word hypnosis usually has this technical meaning, in contrast to its more familiar lay or psychological meaning of an altered state of consciousness not necessarily caused by drugs—see hypnosis).

•             Analgesia (lack of sensation which also blunts autonomic reflexes)

•             Muscle relaxation

Different types of anesthesia affect the endpoints differently. Regional anesthesia, for instance, affects analgesia; benzodiazepine-type sedatives (used for sedation, or "twilight anesthesia") favor amnesia; and general anesthetics can affect all of the endpoints. The goal of anesthesia is to achieve the endpoints required for the given surgical procedure with the least risk to the patient.

The anesthetic area of an operating room

To achieve the goals of anesthesia, drugs act on different but interconnected parts of the nervous system. Hypnosis, for instance, is generated through actions on the nuclei in the brain and is similar to the activation of sleep. The effect is to make people less aware and less reactive to noxious stimuli.

Loss of memory (amnesia) is created by action of drugs on multiple (but specific) regions of the brain. Memories are created as either declarative or non-declarative memories in several stages (short-term, long-term, and long-lasting) the strength of which is determined by the strength of connections between neurons termed synaptic plasticity. Each anesthetic produces amnesia through unique effects on memory formation at variable doses. Inhalational anesthetics will reliably produce amnesia through general suppression of the nuclei at doses below those required for loss of consciousness. Drugs like midazolam produce amnesia through different pathways by blocking the formation of long-term memories.

Tied closely to the concepts of amnesia and hypnosis is the concept of consciousness. Consciousness is the higher order process that synthesizes information. For instance, the "sun" conjures up feelings, memories and a sensation of warmth rather than a description of a round, orange warm ball seen in the sky for part of a 24 hour cycle. Likewise, a person can have dreams (a state of subjective consciousness) during anesthetic or have consciousness of the procedure despite having no indication of it under anesthetic. It is estimated that 22% of people dream during general anesthesia and 1 or 2 cases per 1000 have some consciousness termed "awareness during general anesthesia".

General anesthesia

Further information: General anaesthesia, General anesthetic, and Inhalational anesthetic

A vaporizer holds a liquid anesthetic and converts it to gas for inhalation (in this case sevoflurane)

Anesthesia is a combination of the endpoints (discussed above) that are reached by drugs acting on different but overlapping sites in the central nervous system. General anesthesia (as opposed to sedation or regional anesthesia) has three main goals: lack of movement (paralysis), unconsciousness, and blunting of the stress response. In the early days of anesthesia, anesthetics could reliably achieve the first two, allowing surgeons to perform necessary procedures, but many patients died because the extremes of blood pressure and pulse caused by the surgical insult were ultimately harmful. Eventually, the need for blunting of the surgical stress response was identified by Harvey Cushing, who injected local anesthetic prior to hernia repairs This led to the development of other drugs that could blunt the response leading to lower surgical mortality rates.

The most common approach to reach the endpoints of general anesthesia is through the use of inhaled general anesthetics. Each anesthetic has its own potency which is correlated to its solubility in oil. This relationship exists because the drugs bind directly to cavities in proteins of the central nervous system, although several theories of general anesthetic action have been described. Inhalational anesthetics are thought to exact their effects on different parts of the central nervous system. For instance, the immobilizing effect of inhaled anesthetics results from an effect on the spinal cord whereas sedation, hypnosis and amnesia involve sites in the brainThe potency of an inhalational anesthetic is quantified by its minimum alveolar concentration or MAC. The MAC is the percentage dose of anesthetic that will prevent a response to painful stimulus in 50% of subjects. The higher the MAC, generally, the less potent the anesthetic.

Syringes prepared with medications that are expected to be used during an operation under general anesthesia maintained by sevoflurane gas:

- Propofol, and hypnotic

- Ephedrine, in case of hypotension

- Fentanyl, for analgesia

- Atracurium, for neuromuscular blockade

- Glycopyrronium bromide (here under trade name "Robinul"), reducing secretions

The ideal anesthetic drug would provide hypnosis, amnesia, analgesia, and muscle relaxation without undesirable changes in blood pressure, pulse or breathing. In the 1930s, physicians started to augment inhaled general anesthetics with intravenous general anesthetics. The drugs used in combination offered a better risk profile to the person under anesthesia and a quicker recovery. A combination of drugs was later shown to result in lower odds of dying in the first 7 days after anesthetic. For instance, propofol (injection) might be used to start the anesthetic, fentanyl (injection) used to blunt the stress response, midazolam (injection) given to ensure amnesia and sevoflurane (inhaled) during the procedure to maintain the effects. More recently, several intravenous drugs have been developed which, if desired, allow inhaled general anesthetics to be avoided completely.

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