Reanimation of rodents: an animal model for cognitive recovery from anaesthesia

Outside of the specialty, there is often a simplified perception that anaesthesiology focuses solely on inducing and maintaining an anaesthetised state. However, patients and their families never seek a one-way trip into the abyss of general anaesthesia, a point emphasised by a senior colleague who quipped, 'any fool can put someone to sleep, it's being able to wake them up again that's important'. When emergence goes awry, in the best cases, it manifests as a mere temporal delay to normal wakefulness. However, aberrant emergence can portend underlying neuropathology including emergence and postoperative delirium, delayed neurocognitive recovery, and postoperative neurocognitive disorder. With unclear causal links between abnormal patterns of emergence and long-term outcomes, unravelling the basic neurobiology of emergence and the range of normal variability is paramount.