Memory Priming in General Anesthesia

• Status: Completed
• Trial end date: 2016-09-15
• Target enrollment: 0
• Participant gender: All

Summary

Memory priming under general anesthesia is a phenomenon of incredible interest in the study of consciousness and unconscious cognitive processing, and for clinical practice.

However results from anesthesiological literature are divergent and methodologies vary.

To overcome these limits, the present study aims at better defining the phenomenon of memory priming under general anesthesia, manipulating as experimental variables both the anesthetic drug used and the stimuli primed.

• Phase: N/A
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers?: No

Details

• Lead Sponsor: Fondazione I.R.C.C.S. Istituto Neurologico Carlo Besta
• Collaborator: University of Milano Bicocca
• Treatments: Anesthetics; Propofol; Sevoflurane

Criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

• patient undergoing general anesthesia for back surgery

• American Society of Anesthesiology (ASA) physical status classification I or II

• Italian native speaker

• right handed (assessed with the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory)

• not to suffer from memory deficits, hearing impairment or any other medical/psychiatric condition that could affect the memory performance or hearing

Exclusion Criteria:

• to develop a postoperative cognitive dysfunction or delirium or any other medical complication that could prevent the memory testing or that could affect memory performance