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".