Dependability of Inhalation Anesthesia Assessed by Comprehensive Gene Expression Profiling. Rattus norvegicus

Although general anesthesia is routinely used as an essential surgical procedure and its harmlessness has been evaluated and endorsed by clinical outcomes, little is known its comprehensive influence not reflected into mortality and morbidity. Here we show that inhalation anesthesia significantly affected expression of less than 1.5% of over 10,000 genes by analyzing expression profiles for multiple organs of rats under anesthesia with sevoflurane. The small number of transcripts affected by the inhalation anesthesia comprised those specific to single and common in pleural organs. The former included genes mainly associated with metabolism, a vasoconstrictor, endothelin 1, in the lungs and genes whose expression is influenced by agents such as amphetamine in the brain. The latter contained multiple circadian genes previously identified, including novel candidates. In the brain we failed to detect alteration of the clock gene expression except Per2 whose expression pattern was contradictory to the previous findings, assuming that inhalation anesthesia perturbs circadian rhythms in the central nervous system. Our findings provide the first assessment for dependability of inhalation anesthesia by approaches of experimental biology and genome science.