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 anesthesia. Even though it is one of the safest medical practices, we still don't have a complete, thorough understanding of precisely how anesthetic drugs work in the brain.
In fact, it has largely remained a mystery since general anesthesia was introduced into medicine over . Our study published provides new clues on the intricacies of the process. General anesthetic 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 anesthetic drugs to interact with specific types of neurons (brain cells), and it's all to do with proteins. Your brain has around and not all of them are the same – it's these differences that allow general anesthesia to be effective. To be clear, we're not completely in the dark on .
We know why general anesthetics are able to make us lose so quickly, thanks to a . 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 .
The first are what we call "excitatory" neurons, generally responsible for keeping us alert and awake. The second are "inhibitory" neurons – their job is to regulate and control the excitatory ones. In our day-to-day lives, excitatory and inhibitory neurons are constantly working and balancin.