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Previous Volume 358:1189-1191 March 13, 2008 Number 11 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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More than 21 million patients in North America alone receive general anesthesia each year,¹ and thanks to increasing knowledge, skill, and sophisticated technology, the vast majority of anesthetic procedures are uneventful. However, a rare but serious adverse event is the explicit recall of sensory perceptions during general anesthesia, termed "awareness" or "intraoperative awareness." The incidence of awareness may be as high as 1 or 2 for every 1000 patients, possibly higher among children.^2,3,4,5 Awareness occurs more frequently among patients who have received neuromuscular-blocking drugs, who cannot signal to the medical team that they are conscious.³ In most cases, awareness is . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

From the Departments of Anesthesia and Physiology, University of Toronto, and the Department of Anesthesia, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre — both in Toronto.

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Ponte, J., Lynch, G., Grant, I., Morley, A., Sneyd, J. R. (2008). Memory and awareness during anaesthesia. Br J Anaesth 101: 738-740 [Full Text]  
• Kelley, S. D., Manberg, P. J., Sigl, J. C., Myles, P. S., Leslie, K., Forbes, A., Bo, L., Li, J., Deng, X., Aretha, D., Kiekkas, P., Eleftheria, P., Cook, T. M., Avidan, M. S., Searleman, A. C., Evers, A. S., Orser, B. A. (2008). Anesthesia Awareness and the Bispectral Index. NEJM 359: 427-431 [Full Text]