Caffeine accelerates emergence from anesthesia

There is currently no reliable reversal agent for general anesthesia. However, recent work has shown that three drugs that elevate intracellular cAMP (forskolin, theophylline, and caffeine) accelerate emergence from anesthesia in rats. In this podcast, Editor-in-Chief Bill Yates (University of Pittsburgh) talks with Jimmy Xie, Robert Fong, and Aaron Fox (all from the University of Chicago) about a new study that shows that caffeine is effective even at high levels of anesthetic, and which explores the mechanisms underlying this finding.

Caffeine accelerates recovery from general anesthesia via multiple pathways
Robert Fong, Suhail Khokhar, Atif N. Chowdhury, Kelvin G. Xie, Josiah Hiu-Yuen Wong, Aaron P. Fox, Zheng Xie
Journal of Neurophysiology, published online September 1, 2017. DOI: 10.1152/jn.00393.2017.