Neuroimaging the Effects of Intravenous Anesthetic on Amygdala Dependent Memory Processes

• Status: Terminated
• Trial end date: 2013-11-01
• Target enrollment: 0
• Participant gender: All

Summary

This study involves 60 healthy volunteers aged between 18 and 50 recruited from the general community. It involves doing a set of simple memory tests while inside a fMRI machine. The subject is given a very low dose of an anesthetic drug intravenously while in the scanner. The subject then sees a sequence of pictures on a screen, and presses a button if they remember seeing the picture before. While this is happening, the scanner will be capturing images that tell us what parts of the brain are active. Hypothesis: patterns of hippocampal and amygdala activation during the encoding and retrieval of memory,as measured by fMRI, will be altered by intravenous anesthetics such that suppression of hippocampal and amygdala activities will be dissociable. This dissociation pattern will be different between the drugs propofol and thiopental.

• Phase: Phase 4
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers?: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Details

• Lead Sponsor: Weill Medical College of Cornell University
• Collaborators: National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS); National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• Treatments: Anesthetics; Anesthetics, Intravenous; Propofol; Thiopental

Criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

• age b/w 18 and 50

• right-handed

• minimum of high school education

• fluent in English

• normal vocabulary

Exclusion Criteria:

• any significant medical/psychiatric comorbidity

• deficit in vision or hearing that would impede the study

• allergies to any of the study drugs, to soybeans, or eggs.

• history of head trauma

• family history of major psychiatric illness

• body mass index > 30 kg/m2

• claustrophobia

• prior exposure to IAPS pictures

• pregnancy

• permanent metal objects anywhere in the body

• a personal/family history of any porphyria