ANAESTHETICS leave people groggy, but a dose of Ritalin could wake them up. Anaesthetised rats injected with the drug, which is used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in children, awoke almost immediately, suggesting that the drug could be used to reverse the effects of general anaesthesia.
Currently, there is no way to reverse anaesthesia. “We just sit and let the drugs wear off,” says Emery Brown of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Since general anaesthetics seem to suppress the firing of neurons in the brain’s cortex, Brown’s team reasoned that boosting their activity might have the opposite effect. Ritalin increases levels of dopamine in the brain’s arousal pathways. The anaesthetised rats given the drug came to in an average of 90 seconds, compared with 280 seconds when left to wake up naturally (Anesthesiology, DOI: 10.1097/ALN.0b013e31822e92e5).
If replicated in humans, Ritalin could enable patients to feel wide awake in minutes, rather than hours. Similar drugs are being investigated to help rouse people from coma.
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