What Similarities And Differences Between Sleep, Amnesia And Coma

What Similarities And Differences Between Sleep, Amnesia And Coma.
Doctors can understand more about anesthesia, be in the arms of Morpheus and coma by paying attention to what the three have in common, a reborn report suggests. "This is an effort to try to create a common discussion across the fields," said periodical co-author Dr Emery N Brown, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. "There is a relation between sleep and anesthesia: could this help us understand ways to produce revitalized sleeping medications? If we understand how people come out of anesthesia, can it help us help people come out of comas?" The researchers, who compared the natural signs and brain patterns of those under anesthesia and those who were asleep, crack their findings in the Dec 30, 2010 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

They acknowledged that anesthesia, forty winks and coma are very different states in many ways and, in fact, only the deepest stages of rest resemble the lightest stages of anesthesia. And people choose to sleep, for example, but failing into comas involuntarily. But, as Brown puts it, general anesthesia is "a reversible drug-induced coma," even though physicians present to tell patients that they're "going to sleep".

So "They nearly 'sleep' because they don't want to scare patients by using the word 'coma,'" Brown said. But even anesthesiologists use the call without understanding that it's not quite accurate. "On one level, we indeed don't have it clear in our minds from a neurological standpoint what we're doing".

So what do sleep and anesthesia have in common? Physicians keep an eye on the brains of people when they've been knocked out by anesthesia, and they do the same thing when they study commonalty who are sleeping. "If you have a better understanding of how brain circuits work, you can better understand how to do this". Another consider co-author said both sleep and anesthesia can help shed light on coma, a little conceded phenomenon that strikes people with brain injury and can be induced by physicians to help the body heal.

Dr Nicholas D Schiff, a professor of neurology and neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, said the framework laid by the report, which he co-authored, may serve doctors elevation better sensitivity into how people recover from brain injuries because the process is similar to coming out of general anesthesia. "We recall very little about the step-by-step changes that are associated with recovery from coma. It's starkly that you can have recovery over long periods of time, but figuring out who will recover and why is less clear".

Dr Debra A Schwinn, chairwoman of the segment of anesthesiology & pain medicine at the University of Washington, said the unfledged report is strong and "boldly suggests that anesthetic action in the human brain may be more in parallel with nod off and coma than originally envisioned" treatment. In the future new ideas about how sleep works - that it may be centered in compartments of the wit instead of the whole organ - "will be very interesting to aspire to as they may relate to anesthesia action in the years to come".