The work began when Simon Wiegert, a neuroscientist at the Center for Molecular Neurobiology Hamburg in Germany, and colleagues set out to image the connections between neurons in the hippocampus to figure out how individual synapses contribute to memory formation. And that is, once the drugs have been eliminated from the body, the brain goes back to baseline state. “The results challenge a very fundamental notion that I think the public-and many investigators even-assume.

The authors “not only looked at the onset of the effects and the changes during the acute phase of anesthesia, but like many studies have not done in the past, they’ve also looked at what happens after the drugs wash out,” says Beverley Orser, an anesthesiologist and neuroscientist at the University of Toronto who did not participate in the study. They tested three anesthesia treatments in mice and determined that isoflurane, an inhaled anesthetic commonly used by itself in animal studies and sometimes in combination with other drugs in people, was the least disruptive to hippocampal neurons and didn’t affect memory formation and consolidation. In a study published today (April 1) in PLOS Biology , researchers have taken a step toward understanding how anesthetic drugs affect the hippocampus, a brain region involved in memory formation and storage. ABOVE: A mouse brain section highlighting the hippocampus (green) is overlaid with the molecular structures of the anesthetics isoflurane (purple), medetomidine/midazolam/fentanyl (orange), and ketamine/xylazine (red).Īfter general anesthesia, a common problem that shows up in older adults is cognitive deficits, particularly memory loss, but it’s not clear why or how they happen.

Memory master anesthesia