Anesthetics and Alzheimer's disease: background and research

In the last few decades, anesthesia management has clearly shown major advances in technology and drug development, permitting improvement of surgical techniques and the possibility of performing complex, prolonged surgical operations even in the very elderly and the critically ill. As a consequence, the evolution of anesthesia procedures has been considered to be amongst the greatest achievements in medicine. In the absence of either a single coherent etiological model to explain the cause of AD or an effective treatment, recent research has focused on reduction of disease incidence through identification of risk factors. In this context the question of the association between AD and anesthesia has again been raised. Accumulating clinical and epidemiological evidence has pointed to the potential adverse consequences of general anesthesia and a possible link with anesthesiainduced changes in molecules known to be involved in the pathogenesis of AD.