Anesthesia is a treatment that prevents patients from feeling pain during procedures like surgery, medical tests, and dental work. Anesthesiologists are doctors who have been specifically trained to give medicines used for anesthesia, which are called anesthetics.
Depending on the procedure they’re having, patients receive different types of anesthesia:
- General anesthesia affects the whole body and makes patients unconscious and immobile. Doctors use it for complex surgeries involving internal organs or other invasive or time-consuming procedures.
- Monitored sedation relaxes patients and may induce sleep but doesn’t cause unconsciousness. Doctors often combine this type of anesthesia with other types of pain relief for procedures like complex dental work.
- Regional anesthesia numbs pain and sensation to only the area of the body that needs it. For example, doctors can give regional anesthesia to ease the pain of childbirth. Patients stay conscious and comfortable.
- Local anesthesia affects only a small part of the body. Doctors can use it to block pain to a single tooth during a dental procedure or to a part of the skin that needs stitches.
Doctors can give anesthesia in various ways. For example, they may deliver general anesthesia or monitored sedation directly into the bloodstream through a needle inserted in a vein. Some general anesthetics are gases that patients can inhale, so doctors administer them through a mask covering the mouth and nose. On the other hand, they can give local anesthesia through an injection, a topical lotion or spray, eye drops, or a skin patch.
Anesthesia prevents the feeling of pain by stopping neurons from passing electrical signals to the brain. Some types of anesthetics block pain by changing the release of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters, which lowers the activity of neurons. Others change the activity of certain proteins in neuron membranes that help transmit signals, which interrupts communication between the cells. And still other anesthetics work in different ways, but scientists don’t know exactly how.
NIGMS funds scientists studying the basic mechanisms of anesthesia to optimize its safety and minimize its side effects. Some of the topics they study include understanding how the brain wakes up from general anesthesia, how anesthesiologists can better tailor medicine to their patients, and if long-acting anesthetics can treat pain after surgery. Scientists can use cell cultures, which are cells derived from humans or research organisms and grown in a lab, to understand how anesthetics act and to help test possible new anesthetics for toxicity.
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