A wide variety of special techniques is now employed in clinical electroencephalography (Kaufman and Watson, 1949) to unmask latent abnormalities in cerebral electrical activity. One of the most useful of these is clinical and electrical observation of the patient while asleep (Gibbs and Gibbs, 1941, 1947; Wyke, 1949), and this provides information of physiological as well as of direct clinical...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of propofol infusion for both induction and maintenance of anesthesia on hemodynamics and recovery in elderly patients compared with conventional thiopental-isoflurane anesthesia. DESIGN Randomized, prospective, study. SETTING Teaching hospital. PATIENTS 60 nonpremedicated ASA physical status I, II, and III adult elderly patients scheduled to undergo...

BACKGROUND Possible utility of high-dose i.v. melatonin as an anaesthetic adjuvant has not been studied. This study compared its effects with thiopental and propofol. METHODS Sprague Dawley rats were assigned to receive bolus or cumulative i.v. doses of melatonin, thiopental or propofol. Righting reflex, hindpaw withdrawal to a noxious stimulus, response to tail clamping and haemodynamic effe...

Studies of factors affecting the initial disposition of drugs with a rapid onset of effect following i.v. administration have used antipyrine as a surrogate for lipophilic drugs because it lacks cardiovascular effects. The present study tested the assumption that antipyrine is a useful surrogate for the flow-dependent tissue distribution of the lipophilic drug thiopental by comparing the recirc...

Background: Giving a benzodiazepine or opioid with an intravenous anaesthetic agent generally result in synergism. However, few studies so far have detailed the relationship when two intravenous anaesthetics are given simultaneously. The aim of this study is to investigate the interaction between propofol and thiopental when given in fixed and variable dose ratios. Methods: Ninety patients were...

OBJECTIVE We aimed to evaluate the effect of anaesthesia with thiopental (4 mg kg(-1)), ketamine (1 mg kg(-1)) and ketamine-thiopental (1 mg kg(-1) and 4 mg kg(-1), respectively) combination during electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) and Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAM-A) and haemodynamic variables in patients with resistant major depression. METH...