Researchers Find Links Between Sleep, Anesthesia and Coma

Doctors can study more about anesthesia, sleep and coma by paying attention to what the three have in general, a new report suggests.

"This is an effort to try to create a general discussion across the fields," said review co-author Dr. Emery N. Brown, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. "There is a relationship between sleep and anesthesia: could this help us understand ways to produce new sleeping medications? If we understand how people come out of anesthesia, can it help us help people come out of comas?"

The researchers, who compared the physical signs and brain patterns of those under anesthesia and those who were asleep, report their findings in the Dec. 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. They acknowledged that anesthesia, sleep and coma are very different states in several ways and, in fact, only the deepest stages of sleep resemble the lightest stages of anesthesia. And people choose to sleep, for example, but lapse into comas involuntarily. But, as Brown puts it, common anesthesia is "a reversible drug-induced coma," even though physicians prefer to tell patients that they're "going to sleep."