Several million anesthetics are administered each year to an increasingly aging and hemodynamically unstable population. These anesthetic drugs have profound hemodynamic depressant effects. The specific anesthetic administered (among the several available drugs) for individual patients may have beneficial or deleterious effects on hemodynamics. These investigations examine the factors (and their interactions) that produce the hemodynamic response to anesthesia. Previous studies have not compared all drugs at several doses in the same subjects to examine how these factors influence the cardiovascular response. In these studies, we establish specific experimental procedures (full-factorial design) that enable us to analyze all the factors influencing the hemodynamic response of dogs under anesthesia. The same subjects undergo replicate hemodynamic measures for each level of each factor.
