Accelerated Recovery of Consciousness after General Anesthesia Is Associated with Increased Functional Brain Connectivity in the High-Gamma Bandwidth
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience March 23, 2017 Duan Li, Viviane S. Hambrecht‐Wiedbusch, George A. Mashour 33 citations
High-frequency gamma connectivity across the cortex is present during consciousness and depressed during unconsciousness. Subanesthetic ketamine (25 mg/kg) administered during isoflurane anesthesia accelerates recovery upon discontinuation of the primary anesthetic and increases gamma power during emergence. In rodents, ketamine reduced emergence time by 44%. During accelerated emergence, frontal-parietal coherence and normalized symbolic transfer entropy in high-frequency gamma bandwidth were increased compared with saline-treated controls. Surrogates of cortical information exchange in high-frequency gamma are increased in association with accelerated recovery from anesthesia, suggesting a functional significance of high-gamma information transfer in consciousness.