Study Finds How Anaesthesia Disturbs Self-Perception

Anesthetizing an arm affects brain activity and rapidly impairs body perception, scientists have demonstrated.

A research team, led by Dr Stein Silva, were interested in studying the illusions described by many patients under regional anaesthetic.

General Anesthesia - Risks, Post Operative Recovery & Complications
General anesthesia is treatment with medications that induce a state of deep sleep and unconsciousness in the patient in order to be pain free during surgery.

The ultimate aim was to understand how neuronal circuits are reorganised at this exact moment in time and to take advantage of anaesthesia to reconfigure them correctly following trauma.

This would allow anaesthetic techniques to be used in the future to treat pain described by amputated patients in what are known as 'phantom limbs'.

The researchers wanted to discover whether anaesthesia could induce comparable phenomena in the brain. If so, anaesthetics could be used as new therapeutic tools capable of modulating brain activity.

Local Anesthesia - Indications, Advantages, Adverse Effects & Contraindications
Local anesthesia is a type of anesthesia generally used to block pain sensation only in a specific area of the body that needs to be anesthestized.

They monitored 20 patients who were to have one of their arms anaesthetised before surgery.

The patients were shown 3D images of the hand, shot from different angles, and their ability to distinguish the right hand from the left was assessed.

Dental Anesthesia - Types - Modern Anesthetics - Administration - Contraindications And Complications - FAQs
The advent of anesthesia may be regarded as a cornerstone in the development of modern dentistry.

The results showed how anaesthesia affected the patients' ability to perceive their body correctly.

The researchers found that all the patients described false sensations in their arm.

Spinal Anesthesia - Indications, Advantages, Disadvantages, Complications & Side Effects
Spinal anesthesia, a form of regional anesthesia involves the injection of certain anesthetic drugs into a fluid-filled space in which the spinal cord and the nerves arising from it are suspended using a fine long needle.

Patients under anaesthetic took longer to distinguish between a left and right hand and made far more mistakes than persons not under anaesthetic.

They found that the best results were obtained when the anaesthetised limb was visible.

Anaesthetising the hand (peripheral deafferentation ) modifies brain activity and rapidly changes the way we perceive the outside world and our own body, concludes the researchers.

The team is now using functional brain imaging to characterise the regions concerned in the brain.

The work will be published in the journal Anesthesiology.

Source-ANI