It’s the day of your operation. As the anaesthetic kicks in, you start to drift off… only to reawaken with a scalpel cutting away at you. It is the stuff of nightmares, and there is no fail-safe way to stop it happening, says anaesthesiologist Alex Proekt, at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.
People wake under general anaesthetic about once in every 19,000 cases, according to a large study last year, and when paralysing drugs have been used, their awake state can go unnoticed. But that might be about to change. There is mounting evidence that the stability of brain activity could indicate when a person is no longer still under, and enable us to do something about it.
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