Neuroimaging the Effects of Intravenous Anesthetic on Amygdala Dependent Memory Processes

Summary

This study involves 60 healthy volunteers aged between 18 and 50 recruited from the general community. It involves doing a set of simple memory tests while inside a fMRI machine. The subject is given a very low dose of an anesthetic drug intravenously while in the scanner. The subject then sees a sequence of pictures on a screen, and presses a button if they remember seeing the picture before. While this is happening, the scanner will be capturing images that tell us what parts of the brain are active. Hypothesis: patterns of hippocampal and amygdala activation during the encoding and retrieval of memory,as measured by fMRI, will be altered by intravenous anesthetics such that suppression of hippocampal and amygdala activities will be dissociable. This dissociation pattern will be different between the drugs propofol and thiopental.

Timeline

Start

2007-03

Primary completion

2013-11

Completion

2013-11

Publications

• Pryor KO, Root JC, Mehta M, Stern E, Pan H, Veselis RA, Silbersweig DA. Effect of propofol on the medial temporal lobe emotional memory system: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in human subjects. Br J Anaesth. 2015 Jul;115 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):i104-i113. doi: 10.1093/bja/aev038.

Drugs

Indications

No indication recorded.