Minimum Alveolar Concentrations of Noble Gases, Nitrogen, and Sulfur Hexafluoride in Rats

Abstract

It has been thought that the high pressures of helium and neon that might be needed to produce anesthesia antagonize their anesthetic properties (pressure reversal of anesthesia). We propose an alternative explanation: like other compounds with a low affinity to water, helium and neon are intrinsically without anesthetic effect.

Adding 5 h delayed xenon to delayed hypothermia treatment improves long-term function in neonatal rats surviving to adulthood

“…The maximum safe concentration of inhaled xenon has been suggested to be less than one minimum alveolar concentration (MAC) on hippocampal slices from 7-d-old rats (24). A concentration of 50% xenon used in this study is equivalent to about 1/3MAC in rats (25) or 0.7MAC in humans (26) which is well within the range of proposed safe concentrations as well as being within the effective neonatal neuroprotective range (13,15,20).…”

Protein-Noble Gas Interactions Investigated by Crystallography on Three Enzymes - Implication on Anesthesia and Neuroprotection Mechanisms

“…nitrous oxide was close to 1, a value that corresponded to the ratio of anesthetic potency of xenon compared to nitrous oxide, as assessed by their MAC-immobility (Russell et al, 1992;Koblin et al, 1998). These relationships between gas-induced structural effect and gas-induced narcotic effect allowed proposing a step-by-step mechanism of anesthesia.…”

“…If we compared these data with in-vivo pharmacology studies, we noticed that this ratio corresponded to the ratio of the narcotic potency of xenon compared to nitrous oxide (about 1.38) as estimated by the concentration of gas necessary to induce loss of righting reflex in rodents (Koblin et al, 1998;David et al, 2003), considered to be a behavioural endpoint closely related to MAC-awake (Campagna et al, 2003). In comparison, the ratio of gas-induced volume expansion for xenon and nitrous oxide in annexin V, a protein which could be considered as a prototype of NMDA receptor for its properties of ion selectivity and voltage gating (Demange et al, 1994), did not correspond to the ratio of anesthetic potency of xenon and nitrous oxide.…”

“…Physical and anesthetic properties of argon, krypton and xenon (from (Koblin et al, 1998;Quillin et al, 2000;Ruzicka et al, 2007)). …”

A Review on the Real Life Applications of Helium

“…The lighter inert gas helium is not anesthetics at least up to the highest pressures that can be tolerated before the confounding effects of high-pressure neurological syndrome become pronounced (Koblin et al,1998;Miller et al, 1967). In a study, Coburn et.…”