Comparing the effects of isoflurane and pentobarbital on the responses of cutaneous mechanoreceptive afferents

BMC Anesthesiology

Research Article

Sliman J Bensmaia¹  Alison I Weber¹  Ju-Wen Cheng² 

[1] Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA;Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital at Linkou, Taoyuan, Taiwan; Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA;

关键词: Mechanoreceptive afferents;    Anesthesia;    Isoflurane;    Pentobarbital;    Vibration;    Entrainment;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2253-13-10

 received in 2012-07-25, accepted in 2013-04-16,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundWhile pentobarbital has been used extensively in neurophysiological experiments investigating activity in peripheral nerves, it has fallen out of favor as an anesthetic because of safety concerns and is often replaced with isoflurane. However, the effects of isoflurane on the excitability of mechanoreceptive afferents have yet to be conclusively elucidated.MethodsTo fill this gap, we collected extracellular single-unit recordings of cutaneous mechanoreceptive afferents from the sciatic nerve of 21 rats during vibratory stimulation of the hindpaw. We then compared the strength and temporal structure of the afferent response measured under pentobarbital and isoflurane anesthesia.ResultsWe found that the strength and temporal structure of afferent responses were statistically equivalent whether these were evoked under isoflurane or pentobarbital.ConclusionsWe conclude that, if these two anesthetics have any effect on the responses of mechanoreceptive afferents, their effects are indistinguishable.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Cheng et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.