Search results for "General anesthetics"

Mechanism of Anesthetic Action: Oxygen Pathway Perturbation Hypothesis

2001

Although more than 150 years have past since the discovery of general anesthetics, how they precisely work remains a mystery. We propose a novel unitary mechanism of general anesthesia verifiable by experiments. In the proposed mechanism, general anesthetics perturb oxygen pathways in both membranes and oxygen-utilizing proteins such that the availabilities of oxygen to its sites of utilization are reduced which in turn triggers cascading cellular responses through oxygen-sensing mechanisms resulting in general anesthesia. Despite the general assumption that cell membranes are readily permeable to oxygen, exiting publications indicate that these membranes are plausible oxygen transport barr…