Surgery would be inconceivable without general anesthesia, so it may come as a surprise that despite its 175-year history of medical use, doctors and scientists have been unable to explain how anesthetics temporarily render patients unconscious.
In a new study, researchers solve this longstanding medical mystery using modern nanoscale microscopic techniques, plus clever experiments in living cells and fruit flies.
They found how clusters of lipids in the cell membrane serve as a missing go-between in a two-part mechanism.
Temporary exposure to anesthesia causes the lipid clusters to move from an ordered state to a disordered one, and then back again, leading to a multitude of subsequent effects that ultimately cause changes in consciousness.
The research was conducted by a team at Scripps Research.
The discovery settles a century-old scientific debate, one that still simmers today: Do anesthetics act directly on cell-membrane gates called ion channels, or do they somehow act on the membrane to signal cell changes in a new and unexpected way?
It has taken nearly five years of experiments, calls, debates, and challenges to arrive at the conclusion that it’s a two-step process that begins in the membrane.
General anesthesia has been in use for nearly 175 years, but its mechanism for causing loss of consciousness has been unknown until now.
The team validated the findings in a living animal model. The common fruit fly, drosophila melanogaster, provided that data.
They say the discoveries raise a host of tantalizing new possibilities that may explain other mysteries of the brain, including the molecular events that lead us to fall asleep.
They think the findings are fundamental and foundational, but there is a lot more work that needs to be done.
Scientists will begin to study everything related to the findings: Sleep, consciousness, and all those related disorders.
One author of the study is chemist Richard Lerner, M.D.
The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
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