Malignant hyperthermia is an extremely rare, potentially lethal disorder that occurs in susceptible patients who are exposed to triggering agents such as volatile anesthetic gases or depolarizing muscle relaxants. The clinical manifestations of malignant include hypermetabolism, hyperthermia, hypercapnia, and sustained skeletal rigidity, which result cardiac arrest, brain damage, death. It asso...

The decrease of “functional” endplate receptors in MG can decrease the response to the chemical transmitter acetylcholine, as well as to the depolarizing muscle relaxant succinylcholine. In contrast, the decreased “safety margin” results in a marked sensitivity to nondepolarising relaxants. In normal patients, the wide “safety margin” may explain the slow onset of nondepolarizing block, as well...

The chemical theory of neuromuscular transmission (Dale, Feldberg and Vogt, 1936) is now almost universally accepted, and implicates acetylcholine as the neuromuscular transmitter. Depolarizing muscle relaxants act, at least initially, in a manner similar to acetylcholine and are believed to produce their effects by prolonged depolarization, but in certain situations these agents, instead of pr...

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. CC According to a survey on the use of muscle relaxants, there are a lot of cases where r...

Supramaximal paired stimuli were applied to the ulnar nerve, and the amplitude of the muscle action potential evoked in the abductor digiti minimi by the second member of the stimulus pair (test response) was compared with that evoked by the first component (conditioning response). The interval between the two components of the stimulus pair (the pair interval) was increased stepwise from 7 to ...

Evidence has been presented to show that a second dose of suxamethonium is capable of producing a severe bradycardia in man. This response may be effectively prevented by the prior administration of certain non-depolarizing muscle relaxants namely tubocurarine, alcuronium, c-toxiferine and pancuronium in quantities of one-quarter or less of their muscle relaxant level. It is suggested that suxa...