Anesthesia/anesthetics potency measurement

General anesthetics are soluble in lipids. Only a few are soluble in water. Furthermore, there is a well known correlation between anesthetic potency and lipid solubility. It is the Meyer-Overton rule that has been known for 80 years to researchers in anesthesia.. This relationship was thoroughly studied and reexamined in recent years (See ). In its most modem form the lipid solubility or oil/water partition coefTicient is plotted against the so-called righting reflex taken for a measure of anesthetic potency. It is log 1/p where p is the effective anesthetic pressure in atmospheres required to suppress the righting reflex of mice in half of the experimental animals On this relationship arc based the unitary hypothesis and the hydrophobic site theory which state that all general anesthetics act by the same mechanism at the same molecular or sub-cellular sites of the membrane and that the sites are hydrophobic. 

Current anesthesia protocols usually include several agents in combinations that vary according to the depth of anesthesia required for specific procedures. Inhalational anesthetics, which include nitrous oxide and six halogenated hydrocarbons, have varying potency in proportion to their lipid solubilities. MAC value, a measure of anesthetic potency, is defined as the minimal alveolar anesthetic concentration (% of inspired air) at which 50% of patients do not respond to a surgical stimulus. MAC values are additive, lower in elderly patients, and lower in the presence of opioid analgesics and sedative hypnotics. 

During inhalation anesthesia, the partial pressure of the inhaled anesthetic in the brain equals that in the lung when steady-state conditions are achieved. Therefore, at a given level (depth) of anesthesia, measurements of the steady-state alveolar concentrations of different anesthetics provide a comparison of their relative potencies. The volatile anesthetic concentration is the percentage of the alveolar gas mixture, or partial pressure of the anesthetic as a percentage of 760 mm Hg (atmospheric pressure at sea level). The minimum alveolar anesthetic concentration (MAC ) is defined as the... 

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