What is the difference between Awareness, Consciousness and Depth of Anaesthesia?
The term “awareness” is generally used to describe the experiences of some patients having total recall of events during their anaesthesia. For example, they might be able to repeat sentences or comments that the surgeon made during the operation. The term “Level of consciousness” has been used extensively. It basically means a continuous scale ranging from awake to asleep. The term “depth of anaesthesia” is less precise because anaesthesia consists of 3 components, hypnotics, analgesics and muscle relaxants. The CSM monitors the effect of the hypnotic component and indirectly the effect of the two others. Having said this, please do bear in mind that different authors and healthcare professionals do use the terms differently and randomly switches between the three terms.
