BACKGROUND Recent studies suggest advantages of muscle relaxants for facemask ventilation. However, direct effects of muscle relaxants on mask ventilation remain unclear because these studies did not control mechanical factors influencing ventilation. We tested a hypothesis that muscle relaxants, either rocuronium or succinylcholine, improve mask ventilation. METHODS In anesthetized adult per...

Abstract : Although it has side effects, succinylcholine is still widely used in rapid sequence induction. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the effects of pretreatment with magnesium and precurarization of vecuronium on succinylcholine-induced fasciculation and subsequent tracheal intubation-induced hemodynamic changes during rapid sequence induction. Fifty-five patients were allocat...

While axon fasciculation plays a key role in the development of neural networks, very little is known about its dynamics and the underlying biophysical mechanisms. In a model system composed of neurons grown ex vivo from explants of embryonic mouse olfactory epithelia, we observed that axons dynamically interact with each other through their shafts, leading to zippering and unzippering behavior...

Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are a large conserved family of extracellular proteases, a number of which are expressed during neuronal development and upregulated in nervous system diseases. Primarily on the basis of studies using pharmaceutical inhibitors, MMPs have been proposed to degrade the extracellular matrix to allow growth cone advance during development and hence play largely permi...

Fifty-two randomized trials (5,318 patients) were included in this meta-analysis. In controls, the incidence of fasciculation was 95%, and the incidence of myalgia at 24 h was 50%. Nondepolarizing muscle relaxants, lidocaine, or magnesium prevented fasciculation (number needed to treat, 1.2-2.5). Best prevention of myalgia was with nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs (number needed to treat, 2....

Muscle fasciculations, resulting from the spontaneous activation of motor neurons, may be associated with neurological disorders, and are often assessed intramuscular electromyography (EMG). Recently, however, both ultrasound (US) imaging multichannel surface EMG have been shown to more sensitive fasciculations. In this study we combined these two techniques compare their detection sensitivity ...