title: Effects of Propofol General Anesthesia on Olfactory Relearning.
abstract: How general anesthesia interferes with sensory processing to cause amnesia remains unclear. Here, we show that activation of a learning-associated immediate early gene in rat olfactory cortices is uninterrupted by propofol, an intravenous general anesthetic with putative actions on the inhibitory GABAA receptors. Once learned under anesthesia, a novel odor can no longer re-activate the same high-level transcription programming during subsequent conscious relearning. Behavioral tests indicate that the animals' ability to consciously relearn a pure odorant, first experienced under general anesthesia, is indeed compromised. In contrast, when a mixture of two novel odorants is first experienced under anesthesia and then relearned consciously in pairs with one of the components, the animals show a deficit in relearning only the component but not the mixture. Our results reveal a previously unknown mechanism of unconscious memory due to irreplaceable neuronal commitment under general anesthesia and support the notion that general anesthesia acts at stages beyond cellular coding to disrupt sensory integration for higher-order association.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anesthesiology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.|Department of Anesthesiology, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, 200025, China.
authors.forename: Li-Jie
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Jia
authors.affiliation: Department of Anesthesiology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.|Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.|Department of Computational and Systems Biology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
authors.forename: Pei
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.affiliation: Department of Anesthesiology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
authors.forename: Nicole R
authors.initials: NR
authors.lastname: Brandon
authors.affiliation: Department of Anesthesiology, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, 200025, China.
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Luo
authors.affiliation: Department of Anesthesiology, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, 200025, China.
authors.forename: Buwei
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: Department of Anesthesiology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.|Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.|Department of Structural Biology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xu
mesh_terms: D000768:Anesthesia, General; D000818:Animals; D051792:Basic Helix-Loop-Helix Proteins / Q000378:metabolism; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000187:drug effects; D003071:Cognition / Q000187:drug effects; D003243:Consciousness / Q000187:drug effects; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000187:drug effects; D009812:Odorants; D009833:Olfactory Pathways / Q000187:drug effects / Q000502:physiology*; D066195:Piriform Cortex / Q000187:drug effects / Q000378:metabolism; D015742:Propofol / Q000494:pharmacology*; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D014158:Transcription, Genetic / Q000187:drug effects
chemical_list: D051792:Basic Helix-Loop-Helix Proteins; D015742:Propofol; C516513:Npas4 protein, rat