Pay attention to the reversible changes of anesthetics and postoperative cognitive dysfunction.

Abstract

The progress of human civilization and the development in the new era have put forward higher-level demands for medical industry. The enhancement of health awareness and the improvement of diagnosis and treatment methods have promoted the development of comfortable medicine. Anesthesiologists play such an important role in perioperative period and the comfortable medicine. Evidences show that the diagnosis and treatment of anesthesiologists enable patients to recover quickly, improve treatments, save money, reduce family and social burdens. Postoperative cognitive dysfunction is one of the most common problems faced in perioperative medicine. Although postoperative cognitive dysfunction isn’t a direct threat for life, it may reduce the degree of medical cooperation, occur adverse events unnecessarily, prolong hospital stay, increase expenses and the anxiety of patients and other negative effects. Therefore, clarifying the risk factors of postoperative cognitive dysfunction and exploring effective medical methods are necessary to solve the above problems. The Anesthesiology Branch of the Chinese Medical Association has established a special group for the research of postoperative cognitive dysfunction. At present, research teams in China have been committed to related research on postoperative cognitive dysfunction for a long time. Many results provided valuable suggestions for the prevention and treatment of cognitive dysfunction. Studies showed that age and coronary artery bypass grafting and other major operations are important risk factors for postoperative cognitive dysfunction. This provides warnings for the prevention of postoperative cognitive function in clinical diagnosis and treatment. The management of specific populations and types of surgery are necessary for anesthesiologists to carry out early psychological construction, humanistic care and even medical intervention for patients in particular. Another important finding in these studies is that the occurrence of postoperative cognitive dysfunction is reversible, and the risk period is mainly the early postoperative period and barely has a serious impact on the long-term cognition. These results point out the direction for further improvement of perioperative medicine. With the development of the western region of China, the team of Professor Zhao-Qiong Zhu from the Affiliated Hospital of Zunyi Medical University committed a lot for years in the field of postoperative cognitive dysfunction. The research team found that patients with postoperative cognitive dysfunction are mainly elderly people in clinical studies, and this phenomenon is reversible, and mainly happened in 1 week after surgery. It rarely lasts for months or years. This provides an important theoretical basis to explain the occurrence of this phenomenon and diagnosis as same as provide treatment timely in clinic. On this basis, the team of Professor Zhao-Qiong Zhu carried out further research from the perspectives of behavior, molecular biology, cell biology, morphology, imaging, etc. in order to ascertain the relevant mechanism of postoperative cognitive dysfunction. The results also revealed that the behavioral effects of inhalation anesthetics on experimental animals at clinical and subclinical concentrations are only limited to the early stage after drug application, and the related mechanism may be related to the activation of inflammasomes and central cholinergic receptors. The series of researches provide valuable suggestions for rationally explaining the occurrence of postoperative cognitive dysfunction in clinical diagnosis as well as treatment and further research for postoperative cognitive dysfunction in the future. With the improvement of living standards, the demand for health increases for people. The reversible changes of postoperative cognitive dysfunction as one of the key medical problems in the world will cause concerns for scholars committed to solving. With the efforts of diligent researchers, it is bound to promote the development of medicine.