This has to do with the sex hormone testosterone, according to a new study University of Pennsylvania. The researchers hope this knowledge will lead to new guidelines for the type and quantity of anesthetics.
Gender differences in biology are routinely overlooked in scientific research. These usually disadvantage women, who may have different reactions to medications, illnesses or treatments than men. This also applies to anesthesia, an artificial state of unconsciousness caused by drugs. Women stay awake longer and recover more quickly after anesthesia than men. They also wake up involuntarily more often.
Researchers from University of Pennsylvania they therefore decided to investigate where this difference in sensitivity to anesthesia comes from. They examined both mice and humans, using behavioral and neurocognitive tests. It turns out the difference is likely caused by the sex hormone testosterone, which is more common in men than women.
What is anesthesia?
During anesthesia, or “general anesthesia,” the patient is given substances that numb the body and suppress consciousness. Although the procedure is regularly referred to by both patients and doctors as a form of sleep, previous research suggests it is more akin to a coma. Brain activity decreases dramatically under anesthesia. This makes the activity comparable to that of someone whose brainstem no longer functions. “It’s a reversible coma, but it’s still a coma,” researcher Emery Brown said previously Scientias.nl.
Sticker on the nose
The researchers first set out to measure how quickly someone wakes up from anesthesia. To do this, they attached a sticker to the mice’s faces that the animals could remove with their paws. When they did, it was a sign that the mice had emerged from anesthesia. The test was slightly different in humans. They heard beeps while their response was monitored as a test of consciousness and cognition. Additionally, their brain activity was monitored using an electroencephalogram (EEG), a device that records electrical signals in the brain. A technique also used in clinical situations is used to determine the depth of anesthesia.
Hypothalamus
To the researchers’ surprise, the EEG showed no differences between men and women, neither in mice nor in humans. Therefore, the researchers carried out a more detailed analysis of the entire brain activity of mice under anesthesia. It showed that male mice had more activity in the hypothalamus, a region of the brain involved in regulating sleep and wakefulness. It was already known that testosterone and estrogen influence this area, so the study suggests that testosterone plays an important role in stimulating natural sleep. And indeed, the castrated mice became less sensitive to anesthesia, while the mice given testosterone became more sensitive.
The anesthesia of the future
Before this knowledge can be applied, more research is needed to determine how sex hormones influence other aspects of sleep and wakefulness, such as dream time, REM sleep, and circadian rhythms. The researchers suspect that their findings could have important consequences for the use of anesthesia. Consider other criteria when choosing the appropriate anesthetic agent and dosage, strengths, and safety risks of anesthetics.
When you are under anesthesia, you do not completely lose consciousness
This is one of the conclusions that Finnish researchers previously reached based on a large study published in the journal Anesthesiology. Research strongly suggests that general anesthesia is more similar to sleep than previously thought. In the experiment in which healthy subjects were subjected to light anesthesia, it turned out that almost all of them had dreamed while under anesthesia. And those dreams sometimes turned out to be mixed with reality. This, along with the other findings, strongly suggests that people are not completely unconscious when under anesthesia. “The state of consciousness during anesthesia may be comparable to the situation during natural sleep,” says researcher Antti Revonsuo. “While people sleep they dream and the brain unconsciously observes events and stimuli in the environment.”
2024-01-14 18:04:09
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