Proposal works by interacting with rhe GABA receptors in your brain, that play a key role in the body’s ability to process sensory information, especially chronic pain.
GABA agonists like propofol produce the effects of high GABA levels, which generally makes information processing more challenging. The result is memory loss and generally reduced cognitive function.
Simultaneously, it is metabolized by something g known ad the endocannabanoid system, which produces a metabolite called AEA that interacts with cannabanoid recpetor 1. This is a brain wide process, and generally inhibits neurotransmitter function. It prevents nerves from communicating efficiently.
The combined result is a brain that can’t really process information or run most brain functions. The brain stem is largely uninterrupted, keeping vital functions working, and most body wide processes are managed hormonally not neurological, so the body continues to function whike most to all concious brain function is impaired.
If not for the GABA activation, propofol may cause vivid hallucenigen effect like most drugs that selectively bind to heteroreceptors like CB1, however GABA impairs memory and sensory function preventing this from occuring.
The reason it’s white is because it dissolves so well into lipid/fat, so it’s dissolved in soy-bean oil and a fat found in eggs.
Drugs that work in your brain need to get through lipid walls to act, and your brain is also made from lipid.
When it gets to your blood stream it dissolves into your brain easily and quickly, where it can act on the switches that turn your memory processing and conciousness off.
It natually falls off those switches as the amount of it in the brain goes down, which makes you wake up.
It doesn’t really “put you to sleep” so much as interrupt the chemical interactions of your brain cells and just stops your brain from being able to work.
So in a sense your brain has been forcefully “shut down” and cannot remember what happened. You’re usually not asleep yet but you will not remember.
You know how anesthesia may ask you to count down or count up? Usually patients will remember counting from 1-5 and then they think they passed out but actually they counted to 10-15 but just don’t remember it.
I have nothing educational or profound to add, I just wanted to share a memory from the last time I was put under anesthesia. I started having a panic attack as I was being strapped to the table (I have pretty severe PTSD) I vividly remember crying & telling the nurse that I was scared, I was shaking & everything. The nurse put some type of oxygen over my face & I saw them bring the white liquid in the syringe to put into my IV.
She said, “Can you count back from 10 for me?”
I said, “10, 9..”
And I was out. LMAO It was instantaneous! I never understood why it happened so quickly, I learned a lot today! 😂
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