Involvement of the parabrachial nucleus in emergence from general anesthesia

Jia Li; Qiuyu Zhu; Jiaxin Xiang; Yiyong Wei; Donghang Zhang

doi:10.3389/fnins.2024.1500353

Involvement of the parabrachial nucleus in emergence from general anesthesia

Front Neurosci. 2024 Dec 11:18:1500353. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2024.1500353. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Jia Li^#¹, Qiuyu Zhu^#², Jiaxin Xiang³, Yiyong Wei⁴, Donghang Zhang⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Anesthesiology, Honghui Hospital, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China.
² Department of Anesthesiology, The Second Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen & Longgang District People's Hospital of Shenzhen, Shenzhen, China.
³ Department of Anesthesiology, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, United States.
⁴ Department of Anesthesiology, Longgang District Maternity & Child Healthcare Hospital of Shenzhen City, Longgang Maternity and Child Institute of Shantou University Medical College, Shenzhen, China.
⁵ Department of Anesthesiology, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

The parabrachial nucleus (PBN), located in the dorsolateral pons, is involved in many important biological functions, such as sensory signaling, feeding, defensive behaviors, fear, anxiety, and sleep-wake cycles. General anesthesia shares the classical feature of reversible loss of consciousness with natural sleep, and accumulating evidence has indicated that general anesthesia and sleep-wake behaviors share some common underlying neural mechanism. In recent years, emerging studies have investigated the involvement of PBN in emergence from general anesthesia, but divergence exists in terms of different types of general anesthetics or different durations of treatment with the same group of general anesthetics. Here, we reviewed the current literature and summarized the evidence about the contribution of PBN to general anesthesia.

Keywords: PBN; general anesthesia; general anesthetics; parabrachial nucleus; review.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by Grant No. 82204359 from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant No. 2023-JC-QN-0989 from the Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province, Grant No. Y2024004 from the Research Initiation Fund of Longgang District Maternity & Child Healthcare Hospital of Shenzhen City, the Doctor Research Initiation Fund of Zunyi Medical University [(2021)3], and Grant No. 2023MZFS003 from the Research Grant of Key Laboratory of Anesthesiology and Resuscitation (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Ministry of Education.