The effects of sevoflurane anesthesia on rat hippocampus: A genomic expression analysis

Abstract Recent studies have shown that general anesthesia induces memory impairment. Sevoflurane, an inhalation anesthetic, is widely used in clinical practice, increasing pieces of evidence suggest that sevoflurane impairs memory processes due to changing gene expression in hippocampus. However, little is known about genome-widely analyzing the expression change induced by sevoflurane in hippocampus. In this study, we profiled the changes of hippocampal gene expression by microarray analysis. Six-week-old male Sprague–Dawley rats were anesthetized for 4 h with 2.5% sevoflurane ( n = 6 ) and were sacrificed 48 h later. RNA was extracted from the hippocampus for gene expression profile. Compared to control group, 417 genes, including up-regulated 67 and down-regulated 350, were significantly changed (> 2.0 or P