[General anesthesia for magnetic resonance. Experience on 100 cases].

The diffusion of magnetic resonance imaging as a powerful non-invasive diagnostic procedure has led to an increasing request for general anaesthesia in patients who cannot lie still and/or who cannot guarantee adequate spontaneous breathing during the procedure. We report our own experience in 100 patients of this kind, in whom the need for general anaesthesia was due to neurological problems and/or tender age. Anaesthesia and monitoring devices were either devoted of ferromagnetic properties (allowing their location near the patient; as the ARM-S88 portable ventilator, which we used for adult patients) or connected to the patient with long connectors (allowing their location outside the resonance magnetic field; as the Draeger-Babylog pressometric ventilator, which we used in pediatric patients).

[Labetalol in the prophylaxis of postoperative arterial hypertension in surgery of the posterior cranial fossa].

Increased catecholamines are one of the factors responsible for post-operative arterial hypertension. In order to prevent this severe complication labetalol, an alpha and beta blocking drug, was infused following the closure of the dura mater in half of the patients studied. For two hours after surgery blood pressure values in treated patients were constantly lower than those recorded in the control group, thus confirming the efficacy of this drug in preventing the cardiocirculatory effects of increased adrenalin and noradrenalin.

Sensitivity to curare in patients with upper and lower motor neurone dysfunction.

Sensitivity to the action of nondepolarising relaxants was compared in muscles of upper and lower limbs in four syringomyelic patients undergoing elective neurosurgical procedures. It was observed that muscles with signs of lower motor neurone dysfunction are supersensitive to the action of nondepolarising relaxants. Terminal sprouting of motor axons and the occurrence of newly formed neuromuscular junctions may be responsible for a low synaptic efficacy and may explain the high sensitivity to factors that reduce the safety margin of neuromuscular transmission.