Health & Medicine
MIT Study Examines Brain's Consciousness under Anesthesia
Kathleen Lees
First Posted: Mar 05, 2013 12:41 AM EST
A new study shows that certain patterns produced by a general anesthesia drug could help doctors to better monitor patients.
Though regularly used, little is still known about how or why anesthetic drugs create such a profound loss of consciousness.
The study tracked the brain's activity in human volunteers over a two-hour period as they lost and regained consciousness over the period of an hour. Researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) then identified distinctive brain patterns associated with different stages of general anesthesia. The findings showed some interesting insights.
Anesthesiologists now rely on a monitoring system that takes electroencephalogram (EEG) information and combines it into a single number between zero and 100. However, that index actually obscures the information that would be most useful, according to the authors of the new study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of March 4.
"When anesthesiologists are taking care of someone in the operating room, they can use the information in this article to make sure that someone is unconscious, and they can have a specific idea of when the person may be regaining consciousness," says senior author Emery Brown, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and health sciences and technology and an anesthesiologist at MGH.
Patrick Purdon is the lead author of the paper and an instructor of anesthesia at MGH and Harvard Medical School.
Researchers believe, according to reports, that better anesthesia monitoring may help to gain more insight for future data.
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First Posted: Mar 05, 2013 12:41 AM EST
A new study shows that certain patterns produced by a general anesthesia drug could help doctors to better monitor patients.
Though regularly used, little is still known about how or why anesthetic drugs create such a profound loss of consciousness.
The study tracked the brain's activity in human volunteers over a two-hour period as they lost and regained consciousness over the period of an hour. Researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) then identified distinctive brain patterns associated with different stages of general anesthesia. The findings showed some interesting insights.
Anesthesiologists now rely on a monitoring system that takes electroencephalogram (EEG) information and combines it into a single number between zero and 100. However, that index actually obscures the information that would be most useful, according to the authors of the new study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of March 4.
"When anesthesiologists are taking care of someone in the operating room, they can use the information in this article to make sure that someone is unconscious, and they can have a specific idea of when the person may be regaining consciousness," says senior author Emery Brown, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and health sciences and technology and an anesthesiologist at MGH.
Patrick Purdon is the lead author of the paper and an instructor of anesthesia at MGH and Harvard Medical School.
Researchers believe, according to reports, that better anesthesia monitoring may help to gain more insight for future data.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone