{"id":7043,"date":"2024-07-16T19:53:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-17T00:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=7043"},"modified":"2024-07-16T19:53:03","modified_gmt":"2024-07-17T00:53:03","slug":"study-reveals-how-an-anesthesia-drug-induces-unconsciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2024\/07\/16\/study-reveals-how-an-anesthesia-drug-induces-unconsciousness\/","title":{"rendered":"Study reveals how an anesthesia drug induces unconsciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/news.mit.edu\/2024\/study-reveals-how-anesthesia-drug-induces-unconsciousnes-0715\">MIT<\/a> Propofol, a drug commonly used for general anesthesia, derails the brain\u2019s normal balance between stability and excitability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are many drugs that anesthesiologists can use to induce unconsciousness in patients. Exactly how these drugs cause the brain to lose consciousness has been a longstanding question, but MIT neuroscientists have now answered that question for one commonly used anesthesia drug.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Using a novel technique for analyzing neuron activity, the researchers discovered that the drug propofol induces unconsciousness by disrupting the brain\u2019s normal balance between stability and excitability. The drug causes brain activity to become increasingly unstable, until the brain loses consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe brain has to operate on this knife\u2019s edge between excitability and chaos. It\u2019s got to be excitable enough for its neurons to influence one another, but if it gets too excitable, it spins off into chaos. Propofol seems to disrupt the mechanisms that keep the brain in that narrow operating range,\u201d says Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience and a member of MIT\u2019s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The new findings,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.neuron.2024.06.011\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">reported today in&nbsp;<em>Neuron<\/em><\/a>, could help researchers develop better tools for monitoring patients as they undergo general anesthesia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Miller and Ila Fiete, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, the director of the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience Center (ICoN), and a member of MIT\u2019s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, are the senior authors of the new study. MIT graduate student Adam Eisen and MIT postdoc Leo Kozachkov are the lead authors of the paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/news.mit.edu\/2024\/study-reveals-how-anesthesia-drug-induces-unconsciousnes-0715\">Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>MIT Propofol, a drug commonly used for general anesthesia, derails the brain\u2019s normal balance between stability and excitability. There are many drugs that anesthesiologists can use to induce unconsciousness in patients. Exactly how these drugs cause the brain to lose consciousness has been a longstanding question, but MIT neuroscientists have now answered that question for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coping-with-covid"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7043"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7044,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7043\/revisions\/7044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}