Now a days illness is less terrible because anaesthetic (use).
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Two and a half years ago Susan Baker spent three hours under general anesthesia as surgeons fused several vertebrae in her spine. Everything went smoothly, and for the first six hours after her operation, Baker, then an 81-year-old professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was recovering well. That night, however, she hallucinated a fire raging through the hospital toward her room. Petrified, she repeatedly buzzed the nurses' station, pleading for help. The next day she was back to her usual self. “It was the most terrifying experience I have ever had,” she says.
Baker's waking nightmare was a symptom of postoperative delirium, a state of serious confusion and memory loss that sometimes follows anesthesia. In addition to hallucinations, delirious patients may forget why they are in the hospital, have trouble responding to questions and speak in nonsensical sentences. Such bewilderment—which is far more severe than the temporary mental fog one might expect after any major operation that requires general anesthesia—usually resolves after a day or two.
Although physicians have known about the possibility of such confusion since at least the 1980s, they had decided, based on the then available evidence, that the drugs used to anesthetize a patient in the first place were unlikely to be responsible. Instead, they concluded, the condition occurred more often because of the stress of surgery, which might in turn unmask an underlying brain defect or the early stages of dementia. Studies in the past four years have cast doubt on that assumption, however, and suggest that a high enough dose of anesthesia can in fact raise the risk of delirium after surgery. Recent studies also indicate that the condition may be more pernicious than previously realized: even if the confusion dissipates, attention and memory can languish for months and, in some cases, years.