Anesthesia drugs may heighten post-surgery pain

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - General anesthesia during surgery may increase a patient's pain after they regain consciousness, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

They said "noxious" or chemically irritating anesthesia drugs, which include most of those used in general anesthesia, sensitize nerves that sense pain and cause inflammation.

"The choice of the anesthesia may be a contributing factor to post-surgical pain and inflammation," said Gerard Ahern of Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, whose study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ahern said doctors have known for some time that anesthesia drugs can cause pain at the injection site or in the lungs, and anesthesiologists often administer drugs first to dull that pain.

"That was thought to be a temporary thing," Ahern said in a telephone interview.

Ahern and colleagues suspected that the noxious chemicals in most general anesthetics were acting on two specific sites on nerve cells known as TRPV1 and TRPA1. Both are involved in sensing pain from irritants in plants, like wasabi.

In lab experiments, they found that TRPA1 -- more commonly known as the mustard oil receptor -- becomes activated when exposed to noxious anesthetics.

"It's a major pain receptor on peripheral nerves," Ahern said. "When they are activated they cause burning pain."