About 11 percent of participants in the study responded to commands despite being under anesthesia, but couldn't remember anything afterwards.
Around 1 in 10 surgery patients studied by researchers were still partly conscious during their procedure despite having been given general anesthesia, a study has suggested.involved 338 patients aged between 18 to 40 and 10 hospitals across the world. Its purpose was to investigate a medical phenomenon known as connected consciousness, which in the field of anesthetics refers to a patient being somewhat aware of what's happening around them while under general anesthesia.
To start, the researchers collected study participants who were due to go under general anesthetic along with a tracheal intubation procedure, in which a tube is inserted into the windpipe to give the patient oxygen, medicine or anesthesia. They found that 37 of the subjects did respond and that women were three times more likely to respond than men were. Of the people who responded, half were able to communicate that they were experiencing pain.
However, after the patients' surgeries went ahead, none of them said they could remember being given the commands. A notable exception was one patient who said they were able to recall the experience of surgery.