Neuroimaging the Effects of Intravenous Anesthetic on Amygdala Dependent Memory Processes
Status:
Terminated
Trial end date:
2013-11-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
This study involves 60 healthy volunteers aged between 18 and 50 recruited from the general
community. It involves doing a set of simple memory tests while inside a fMRI machine. The
subject is given a very low dose of an anesthetic drug intravenously while in the scanner.
The subject then sees a sequence of pictures on a screen, and presses a button if they
remember seeing the picture before. While this is happening, the scanner will be capturing
images that tell us what parts of the brain are active. Hypothesis: patterns of hippocampal
and amygdala activation during the encoding and retrieval of memory,as measured by fMRI, will
be altered by intravenous anesthetics such that suppression of hippocampal and amygdala
activities will be dissociable. This dissociation pattern will be different between the drugs
propofol and thiopental.
Phase:
Phase 4
Details
Lead Sponsor:
Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Collaborators:
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) National Institutes of Health (NIH)