Anesthesia's Effect on Consciousness Solved, Settling Century-old Scientific Debate
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Anesthesia's effect on consciousness solved, settling century-old scientific debate:
A new study from Scripps Research published Thursday evening in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences PNAS) solves this longstanding medical mystery. Using modern nanoscale microscopic techniques, plus clever experiments in living cells and fruit flies, the scientists show how clusters of lipids in the cell membrane serve as a missing go-between in a two-part mechanism. Temporary exposure to anesthesia causes the lipid clusters to move from an ordered state, to a disordered one, and then back again, leading to a multitude of subsequent effects that ultimately cause changes in consciousness.
The discovery by chemist Richard Lerner, MD, and molecular biologist Scott Hansen, PhD, settles a century-old scientific debate, one that still simmers today: Do anesthetics act directly on cell-membrane gates called ion channels, or do they somehow act on the membrane to signal cell changes in a new and unexpected way? It has taken nearly five years of experiments, calls, debates and challenges to arrive at the conclusion that it's a two-step process that begins in the membrane, the duo say. The anesthetics perturb ordered lipid clusters within the cell membrane known as "lipid rafts" to initiate the signal.
"We think there is little doubt that this novel pathway is being used for other brain functions beyond consciousness, enabling us to now chip away at additional mysteries of the brain," Lerner says.
[...] "We think this is fundamental and foundational, but there is a lot more work that needs to be done, and it needs to be done by a lot of people," Hansen says. Lerner agrees.
"People will begin to study this for everything you can imagine: Sleep, consciousness, all those related disorders," he says. "Ether was a gift that helps us understand the problem of consciousness. It has shined a light on a heretofore unrecognized pathway that the brain has clearly evolved to control higher-order functions."
Journal Reference
Mahmud Arif Pavel, E. Nicholas Petersen, Hao Wang, et al. Studies on the mechanism of general anesthesia [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2004259117)
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