Canadian Journal of Anesthesia, Vol 26, 394-401, Copyright © 1979 by Canadian Anesthesiologists' Society

A Comparison of the Effects of Continuous Ketamine Infusion and Halothane on Oxygenation During One-Lung Anaesthesia in Dogs

¹ Departments of Anesthesiology and the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery of the Department of Surgery, The Mount Sinai School of Medicine of the City University of New York, and The Mount Sinai Hospital and Medical Center, One Gustave Levy Place, New York, New York, 10029

It has been shown that a continuous infusion of ketamine during one-lung anaesthesia combined with a 50 per cent oxygen-curare anaesthetic technique will provide consistently lower shunt fraction and higher Pa_OO2 compared with halothane under the same experimental conditions.

Because no additional factor was observed which could account for these changes and because the responses of the animals to the two anaesthetic agents were similar-the only difference being a different initial set point - the experimental model may be considered adequate. In the authors' view the difference in shunt fractions may be attributed to a more stable hypoxic reflex during ketamine anaesthesia.

Further experimentation will be necessary to fully exclude the possibility of sequence-related changes affecting some of these results and to determine whether or not certain groups of dogs respond in a qualitatively different fashion.