Despite these limitations, researchers are taking advantage of a variety of methods to better discern how anesthetic agents induce an anesthetic "state" at the molecular level.
The term state is in quotes, because a wide variety of agents--ranging from single atoms such as xenon to polycyclic hydrocarbons--can produce insensibility to pain and loss of awareness. The molecular targets for these different agents do not appear to be the same. Thus the notion that there is a single molecular mechanism of action for all anesthetic agents is probably an oversimplification. Genetic tools are providing promising results regarding the molecular mechanism of anesthetic action.
For example, researchers can alter specific protein function and then determine whether this protein can be linked to sensitivity or resistance to anesthetic action in lower organisms. These approaches identify what proteins are involved in anesthetic action and can be thought of as a way to better define relevant anesthetic targets, which investigators can then focus on for structural studies.
Other approaches, including sophisticated structural modeling of anesthetic binding to protein targets in a lipid environment and detailed structural determinations of anesthetic binding to soluble proteins, are also showing promise in further revealing the how of anesthetic action at the molecular level. Thus the simple answer to the question "How does anesthesia work? Many of the tools necessary to answer these questions now exist and we can look forward to new insights into how this great boon to humanity works at the molecular level.
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Subscribe to our Newsletter. Add your information below to receive daily updates. For serious surgeries that require a patient to be completely unaware, doctors turn to general anesthesia. This renders patients unconscious with no perception or memory of the surgery though pain from the surgical procedure will be apparent once you wake up. It also limits the physiological responses to surgical cuts, keeping blood pressure, stress hormone release and heart rate constant during the procedure.
The earliest examples of general anesthesia include ether and chloroform. But, there is a fine line between the amount of these drugs needed for surgery and the amount that can be fatal; these drugs were often administered with nothing more than a soaked sponge to the nose, which made it hard to control the dose. Today, the most common modern general anesthetics are mixtures of inhalable gases, which include nitrous oxide laughing gas and various derivatives of ether, such as Isoflurane, Sevoflurane, and desflurane.
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