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General anesthesia
Make it clearer
General anesthesia is a medical intervention performed with anesthetics, the drugs used to produce it. Its main goal is for the person to be unconscious and unable to feel painful stimuli. At the same time, their autonomic reflexes, the responses the body makes on its own without a conscious decision, are kept under control.
To understand how it prevents pain, think of nerves as wires carrying messages to the brain. Anesthesia holds those signals back along the way. Some anesthetics do this by altering the release of neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers that pass the signal from one neuron to the next. Others keep ions, particles with an electrical charge, from crossing the neuron's membrane, and so the signal is stopped.
And how do you wake up? With intravenous anesthetics, the ones given through a vein, the drug redistributes: it leaves the brain and spreads to muscle and adipose tissue, which is the body's fat. The body also metabolizes it, meaning it breaks it down. That is how you wake up.
In brief
General anesthesia is a medical intervention using anesthetic drugs whose main goal is to make a person unconscious and unable to feel painful stimuli while their autonomic reflexes are controlled.
It prevents pain by curbing nerve signals traveling to the brain: some anesthetics alter neurotransmitter release and others keep ions from crossing the neuronal membrane.
With intravenous anesthetics, awakening comes as the drug redistributes from the brain to muscle and adipose tissue, and as it is metabolized.
Sources (2)
- National Center for Biotechnology Information, StatPearls PublishingGeneral Anesthesia for Surgeons, StatPearlsPublished
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of HealthAnesthesia, NIGMS Fact Sheet
This page explains the topic in general terms; it does not tell anyone what treatment to follow.
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