A Study to Determine if Caffeine Accelerates Emergence From Anesthesia

At present clinicians have no way to reverse anesthesia. Patients wake when their bodies clear the anesthetic. Most people wake quickly, but some do not. All patients have memory and other cognitive problems after waking from anesthesia. In studies on animals, the investigators observed that caffeine caused rats and mice to wake much more rapidly from anesthesia. This was true for all the animals tested. The investigators would like to see if this holds true in humans. Will caffeine accelerate waking from anesthesia? Will it reverse the cognitive deficits associated with anesthesia, after waking? The investigators carried out a modest trial with 8 test subjects. Each volunteer was anesthetized twice. Each volunteer was anesthetized one time and received an infusion of saline (placebo control), without the aid of any other drugs and the other time the volunteer received an infusion of a relatively low dose of caffeine. The order of saline versus caffeine was randomized and the study was done in a double blind manner. We observed that emergence from anesthesia was significantly accelerated by the caffeine infusion. No adverse events were observed.