Drug abuse among some anesthesiologists may be linked to exposure to low doses of powerful anesthetic drugs administered intravenously to surgery patients, according to a University of Florida study.

Anesthesiologists who sit near a patient’s head during surgery are subject to secondhand exposure to anesthetic drugs exhaled by the patient, explained Dr. Mark Gold, a distinguished professor with UF’s McKnight Brain Institute.

Gold said further studies and blood sampling are needed to determine if anesthesiologists really do suffer problems from inhaling trace amounts of anesthetic drugs in much the way that people’s health can be harmed by secondhand smoke.

Anesthesiologists are up to four times more likely to be treated for drug addiction than other doctors, Gold said.

“Most people thought that in the evolution of anesthetic practice from inhaled gases - nitrous oxide and ether, and so forth - to drugs that are administered intravenously, there wouldn’t be secondhand exposure,” Gold said in a prepared statement.

“(Now we see) that those narcotics, which may be 1,000 times more potent than heroin, get into the air, may reach their brain, may change their brain and make it more likely that they’ll crave and want drugs, (become) depressed, and may be more likely that they’ll have a host of behavioral problems,” Gold said.

He and his colleagues used highly sensitive detection equipment to collect and analyze multiple operating room air samples. They found that anesthetic drugs were present in air throughout the operating room, with the highest concentrations over the patient’s mouth.

The findings were presented Oct. 23 at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

Easy access to drugs is a current theory that seems to offer a simple explanation for higher addiction rates among anesthesiologists, said Dr. Mark Aronson, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (news - web sites). However, drug usage is monitored much more closely by hospitals now. That makes access to those drugs more difficult and the easy access addiction theory less plausible.

“Gold’s study offers an interesting and certainly plausible alternative explanation and makes the operating room a potentially dangerous occupational hazard for anesthesiologists. Obviously this needs further research, but I found this work quite intriguing,” Aronson said in a prepared statement.