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Published on: October 16, 2013
Ephedrine accelerates psychomotor recovery from anesthesia in macaque monkeys
1Laboratory of Experimental Anaesthesiology, Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Prague, Czech Republic.
Background:
Ephedrine is used in treatment of hypotension during anesthesia. We investigated its effects on the psychomotor recovery and its potential adverse reactions on cardiorespiratory functions in rhesus monkeys.
Methods:
The monkeys received 50 μg/kg medetomidine, 2.0 mg/kg S-ketamine with 150 IU hyaluronidase i.m. Pulse rate, blood pressure and saturation of haemoglobin were monitored for 20 minutes. Thereafter, 1 mg/kg of ephedrine or a placebo was administered i.m. and behavioural changes, pulse rate, blood pressure and saturation of haemoglobin were monitored every 5 minutes.
Results:
Ephedrine shortened recovery from anaesthesia from 80.4 ± 25.8 to 14.83 ± 13.70 minutes. Ephedrine also increased oxygen saturation of haemoglobin and systolic blood pressure and caused significant decrease in pulse rate 5 minutes after its administration.
Conclusions:
Ephedrine can be successfully used to accelerate psychomotor recovery after the use of common anesthetic protocols combining dissociative anesthetic agent and alpha 2-adrenoceptor agonist in primates.
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