| Popis: |
Peripheral effects of general anesthetic agents are defined in this review as those effects exerted on organs and tissues outside the central nervous system. On one level, they can be considered to encompass a multitude of "side effects," both desirable and undesirable in clinical anesthesia. In this review, however, we are more concerned with assembling evidence, gar nered from studies of the actions of anesthetics outside the central nervous system, which may provide us with some insight into the way these drugs work in any living structure. Indeed, most of the investigation of the basic actions of anesthetics has perforce been carried out in "peripheral" systems because of their easier accessibility and simpler organization. Anesthetics are also of considerable general pharmacological interest since they probably act not by interacting with chemically specific tissue "receptors" ( 1) but rather by affecting the function of living tissue in a different, less specific way. General anesthetics include a wide variety of drugs of differing chemical structures; specific antagonists are not known, and there are remarkable correlations between certain physicochemical properties of these drugs and some of their pharmacological actions. We intend, therefore, to review some of the phenomena produced by anesthetics in a variety of peripheral systems in an attempt to draw certain inferences regarding the mechanism of action of this important class of drugs. We shall not discuss the intermolecular forces which may be involved, since that has been the subject of several recent reviews (2-6) and is covered in this volume by the contribution of Cherkin. Claude Bernard (7) was probably the first to recognize that the ability to be "narcotized," i.e. to undergo a reversible inhibition of biological ac tivity, is a general property of living matter, demonstrable in an amazing variety of biological systems. For example, he observed that narcotic agents reversibly inhibited the activity of Paramecia, phagocytosis, germination of spores, and growth of yeast. His reports stimulated a great deal of investi gation over the ensuing 50 years. The results are summarized in Winter |
