Everyone responds to general anesthetics differently, which can make administering the correct dose tricky. A new device is designed to help, by continuously monitoring anesthetic levels in patients' bloodstreams during surgical procedures.
Anesthesia may be an exact science, but it's not yet fully personalized. Anesthesiologists use a variety of methods to calculate the right dose for a given patient: clinical studies, medical databases and laboratory measurements, for example. However, every individual responds to anesthetics in a different way, and there's no way of knowing what that response will be until the anesthetic is administered.
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Anesthesia may be an exact science, but it s not yet fully personalized. Anesthesiologists use a variety of methods to calculate the right dose for a given patient: clinical studies, medical databases and laboratory measurements, for example. However, every individual responds to anesthetics in a different way, and there s no way of knowing what that response will be until the anesthetic is administered.
Personalizing dosage
Today patients often receive supplemental doses of an anesthetic during their operation based on their reaction. The role of anesthesiologists is to make sure that a patient doesn t wake up too soon and has no memory of the procedure, but they must use the smallest possible amount of drugs, which can often be taxing on the body. In reality, the supplemental doses are administered with no knowledge of what the actual drug concentration already is in the patient.