Exam 4 Review:  Chapter 13:  Anesthesia and PNS Pathologies

anesthesia - A local or general insensibility to pain and loss of bodily sensation with or without the loss of consciousness, induced by an an appropriate pharmacologic agent = anesthetic.

general anesthesia - A body-wide (general) insensibility to pain and loss of bodily sensation (anesthesia) characterized by unconsciousness, muscle relaxation, and loss of sensation over the entire body, and resulting from the administration of a general anesthetic or a mix of anesthetics and other supportive drugs.

local anesthesia - A regional (local) insensibility to pain and loss of bodily sensation (anesthesia) characterized by the loss of sensation only in the area of the body where an appropriate (local anesthetic) drug is applied or injected.

analgesia - A deadening or absence of the sense of pain without loss of consciousness.

paresthesia - An abnornal skin sensation, such as burning, prickling, itching, tingling, numbness, or hyperesthesia (increased sensitivity), with no apparent physical cause, usually associated with peripheral nerve damage.

neuritis - Inflammation of a nerve or group of nerves, characterized by pain and tenderness over the nerves, with anesthesia and paresthesias, and sometimes loss of reflexes, and atrophy (wasting) of the affected muscles; in practice, the term is also used to denote noninflammatory lesions of the PNS.

sciatica - Pain along the sciatic nerve usually caused by a herniated disk of the lumbar region of the spine and the pain, often characterized by paroxysmal attacks, radiating to the back or buttocks and to the back of the thigh, or in the leg or foot, following the course of the branches of the sciatic nerve; the name is also popularly applied to various painful affections of the hip and the parts adjoining it.

shingles - An acute viral infection (herpes/varicella zoster -- the virus causing chicken pox in children) in adults characterized by inflammation of the sensory ganglia of certain spinal or cranial nerves and the eruption of vesicles/blisters along the affected nerve path; it usually strikes only one side of the body and is often accompanied by severe neuralgia; the disease arises by reactivation (usually associated with stress or a decline in cell-mediated immunity) of latent virus particles which persist in spinal or cranial nerve ganglia.

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