Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/219284

Title

A mesoscopic modelling approach to anaesthetic action on brain electrical activity

Author(s)

Liley, David T. J.;  Bojak, Ingo;  Foster, Brett L.

Abstract

While history records many instances in which various substances such as wine, hemp and opium were used to deaden sensibility to the pain of surgery, it was not until William Morton's public demonstration of the painless extraction of a tooth in 1846 using ether that the modern era of anaesthesia can be said to have begun. Within a few years of this demonstration chloroform, diethyl ether and nitrous oxide had all attained a widespread, and ardent, clinical following. While these initial agents were variously highly toxic (chloroform), combustible (diethyl ether, chloroform) or of insufficient potency (nitrous oxide), by the end of the 20th century a range of intravenous and volatile general anaesthetic agents (GAs) had been developed that had overcome all of these limitations. Anaesthesia is now among the safest of all routine clinical procedures, with the mortality attributable to anaes-thesia having fallen from 1 per 10,000 healthy patients in 1950 (when mortality rates began to be systematically assayed) to less than 1 per 250,000 (Kohn et al, 2000). However, the dramatic advances in the clinical certitude and confidence with which anaesthetic agents are administered have not been parallelled by a similar increase in our knowledge of the neural mechanisms responsible for their ability to remove consciousness. While the last three decades or so have seen an explosion in our knowledge regarding the molecular and cellular targets of anaesthetic agents (Franks, 2008; Ishizawa, 2007; Rudolph and Antkowiak, 2004; Grasshoff et al, 2005; Hemmings et al, 2005; Campagna et al, 2003; Franks and Lieb, 1994), we remain largely ignorant regarding the mechanisms by which these microscopic effects produce alterations in large scale neuronal network activity and hence behaviour. Modeling the large scale electrophysiological effects of anaesthetic agents may help to mechanistically unify the multiple cellular and molecular targets of anaesthetic agents that have been identified to date.

Publication type

Book chapter

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Life and Social Sciences. Brain and Psychological Sciences Research Centre

Source

Springer series in computational neuroscience, vol. 15: sleep and anesthesia: neural correlates in theory and experiment / Axel Hutt (ed.), chapter 7, pp. 139-166

Publication year

2011

FOR Code(s)

010202 Biological Mathematics;  110301 Anaesthesiology;  110903 Central Nervous System

Keyword(s)

Anaesthesia;  Brain activity;  Mesoscopic models

Publisher

Springer

ISBN

9781461401728, 1461401720

Publisher URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0173-5

Copyright

Copyright © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011.

Peer reviewed