Assessing changes in volatile general anesthetic sensitivity of mice after local or systemic pharmacological intervention.

One desirable endpoint of general anesthesia is the state of unconsciousness, also known as hypnosis. Defining the hypnotic state in animals is less straightforward than it is in human patients. A widely used behavioral surrogate for hypnosis in rodents is the loss of righting reflex (LORR), or the point at which the animal no longer responds to their innate instinct to avoid the vulnerability of dorsal recumbency. We have developed a system to assess LORR in 24 mice simultaneously while carefully controlling for potential confounds, including temperature fluctuations and varying gas flows. These chambers permit reliable assessment of anesthetic sensitivity as measured by latency to return of the righting reflex (RORR) following a fixed anesthetic exposure. Alternatively, using stepwise increases (or decreases) in anesthetic concentration, the chambers also enable determination of a population's sensitivity to induction (or emergence) as measured by EC50 and Hill slope. Finally, the controlled environmental chambers described here can be adapted for a variety of alternative uses, including inhaled delivery of other drugs, toxicology studies, and simultaneous real-time monitoring of vital signs.