Over 350 million surgeries are performed globally each year. For most of us, it’s likely at some point in our lives we’ll have to undergo a procedure that needs general anaesthesia. Even though it is one of the safest medical practices, we still don’t have a complete, thorough understanding of precisely how anaesthetic drugs work in the brain.
In fact, it has largely remained a mystery since general anaesthesia was introduced into medicine over 180 years ago . Our study published in The Journal of Neuroscience today provides new clues on the intricacies of the process. General anaesthetic drugs seem to only affect specific parts of the brain responsible for keeping us alert and awake.
In a study using fruit flies, we found a potential way that allows anaesthetic drugs to interact with specific types of neurons (brain cells), and it’s all to do with proteins. Your brain has around 86 billion neurons and not all of them are the same – it’s these differences that allow general anaesthesia to be effective. To be clear, we’re not completely in the dark on how anaesthetic drugs affect us .
We know why general anaesthetics are able to make us lose consciousness so quickly, thanks to a landmark discovery made in 1994 . But to better understand the fine details, we first have to look to the minute differences between the cells in our brains. Broadly speaking, there are two main categories of neurons in the brain .
The first are what we call “excitatory” neurons, gene.
