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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Abstract In a recent review of the performance of closed-loop systems in anaesthesia, Brogi et al [2] defined a closed-loop system as an automated control system designed to maintain a…
