2 Clinical Trials for Various Conditions
General anesthetic medications have been shown to cause neuronal cell death in the brains of infant rodents. Ethanol and general anesthetics both act on NMDA and GABA receptors,and appear to have similar mechanisms of toxicity in the immature rodent brain. Functional MRI (fMRI) is a technique developed for mapping brain activation and has been utilized to examine how the brains of children with a history of early exposure to ethanol function differently from children without such a history. This study will utilize fMRI to look for specific changes in brain activation patterns in children with a history of early exposure to general anesthesia, as compared to children without such exposure.
This study will detect whether prior exposure to general anesthesia multiple times is associated with an increased incidence of awareness with explicit recall (AWR). This is especially important because patients who need to undergo multiple events of general anesthesia are medically some of the most vulnerable populations. The study hypothesizes that patients with significant exposure to general anesthesia have a higher incidence of AWR. This study may help clinicians and patients to better understand how to manage anesthesia care so that the safety and comfort of patients can be improved.