Differential effects of gaseous and volatile anaesthetics on sodium and potassium channels.

After 150 years of clinical anaesthesia, the molecular events that lead to anaesthesia have not been determined. This is not because of a lack of ideas [16-19, 56, 571. However, most striking to the observer is the paucity of long-term and systematic studies. The present review describes results from such a study. The long-term goals were: first, to understand how anaesthetics affect membrane protein function and second, to determine if clinical and molecular actions of anaesthetics rnay be correlated.