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General anesthesia: activating a sleep switch?

Ken Solt1

  • 1Department of Anesthesia, Harvard Medical School, and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, USA. ksolt@partners.org

Current Biology : CB
|November 10, 2012
PubMed

Insights

General anesthesia directly activates sleep-promoting brain cells, leading to unconsciousness. This suggests that activating natural sleep pathways is key to how general anesthetics work.

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Anesthesiology

Background:

  • General anesthetics are widely used to induce unconsciousness during medical procedures.
  • The precise mechanisms by which general anesthetics produce their effects remain incompletely understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the direct cellular effects of a widely used general anesthetic on sleep-promoting brain circuits.
  • To determine if endogenous sleep pathways are involved in the anesthetic-induced state of unconsciousness.

Main Methods:

  • Electrophysiological recordings were used to measure the activity of sleep-promoting neurons.
  • The effects of a specific general anesthetic were examined at doses relevant to clinical use.

Main Results:

  • The general anesthetic directly depolarized and activated sleep-promoting neurons in the brain.
  • This cellular activation occurred at anesthetic doses that reliably produced unconsciousness in subjects.

Conclusions:

  • The findings indicate that a widely used general anesthetic directly targets and activates endogenous sleep pathways.
  • Activation of these natural sleep circuits is a likely mechanism underlying general anesthesia and the resulting unconsciousness.

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