10 – Respiratory Depression
Abstract Respiratory depression is a common and unwanted side-effect of anaesthetics, sedatives and analgesics. It has been known since the end of the 18th century that anaesthesia has pronounced effects…
11 – Immobility
Abstract Surgical anaesthesia usually requires hypnosis, antinociception (ensuring blood pressure and heart rate control) and immobility with varying degrees of muscle relaxation. However, the relative contribution of these three components…
13 – Targeted and Individualized Perioperative Medicine for Cognitive Dysfunction
Abstract The ageing population in Western countries combined with advances in anaesthetic management and surgical techniques results in a growing number of frail patients presenting for surgery in the last…
12 – Effects on Brain Function
Abstract Surgery and anaesthesia alter the function of the brain and its control mechanisms. In the operating room, we daily observe the effects of anaesthetic agents during induction and recovery…
9 – Personalized Sedation and Analgesia
Abstract The practice of medicine often requires procedures that cause pain and anxiety. With the advent of modern anaesthesia these procedures have become commonplace and tolerable. Procedures with the greatest…
8 – Analgesia: Effects on Response to Nociceptive Stimulation
Abstract Conscious patients undergoing regional anaesthesia are able to interact with caregivers and indicate when they are feeling pain and/or anxiety during surgery. Unconscious patients on the other hand, not…
7 – Hypnotic Effect: Inducing Unconsciousness and Emergence from Anaesthesia
Abstract General anaesthesia (GA) is a reversible drug-induced state of altered arousal required for more than 60,000 surgical procedures each day in the USA alone, making it one of the…
4 – Covariate Analysis in Clinical Anaesthesia
Abstract The goal of pharmacological treatment is a desired response, known as the target effect (e.g. bispectral index of 50). An understanding of the concentration–response relationship (i.e. pharmacodynamics (PD)) can…
2 – Pharmacokinetic and Pharmacodynamic Modelling in Anaesthesia
Abstract Pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) modelling is a discipline currently under the umbrella of pharmacometrics, and aims to describe, understand and predict the time course of in vivo drug action. In general…
3 – Drug Interactions: Additivity and Synergy among Anaesthetic Drugs
Abstract Modern anaesthesia and sedation consists of giving combinations of hypnotic and analgesic drugs to obtain the desired anaesthetic effect. Understanding how these drugs interact to create the anaesthetic state…
