Brain Imaging of Anaesthesia, version 1.0
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Brain imaging of anaesthesia
IRAS ID
215699
Contact name
Katie Warnaby
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Oxford
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
General anaesthesia is delivered during an operation to stop patients being aware of what is going on, prevent any pain and immobilise the body so that surgery can be carried out safely. Unfortunately, the specialist doctors who deliver anaesthesia do not currently have a reliable way of measuring when an individual's brain becomes unconscious during the surgery. They judge the amount of anaesthetic to give depending on when the average person would lose consciousness, and adapt the dose for that person depending on how the heart or lungs react during the operation.
We have discovered an interesting change in the brain's electrical activity that potentially indicates the point when an individual person under anaesthesia loses perception of the outside world. This could mean that anaesthetists are able to give just the right amount of drug for each person. This is important because, whilst anaesthesia is very safe, some patients who are older or particularly sick may suffer from long-term side effects if they are given too much anaesthesia. It will also prevent the rare event that someone is aware during the operation.
We have called this observation slow wave activity saturation (or SWAS) and it can be measured by applying electrical sensors to the scalp - a technique called electroencephalography (or EEG for short). We plan to record EEG in up to 30 patients before surgery to show that we can give anaesthesia to achieve this SWAS endpoint. After this, we plan to use brain imaging in 30 healthy volunteers to understand what happens in the brain as it reaches SWAS and how it affects sensory experiences like pain and hearing. We also want to know how the person’s sleep patterns influence the anaesthetic dose needed to achieve SWAS, thereby improving our understanding of anaesthesia.
REC name
West Midlands - Coventry & Warwickshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/WM/0030
Date of REC Opinion
2 Feb 2018
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion