The Use of Isoflurane and Adjunctive Magnesium Chloride Provides Fast, Effective Anaesthetization of Octopus vulgaris.

A wide variety of substances have been used to anaesthetise invertebrates, but many are not anaesthetics and merely incapacitate animals rather than preventing pain. In essence, the role of an ideal general anaesthetic is to act as a muscle relaxant, an analgesic, an anaesthetic, and an amnesic. To achieve all these properties with a single substance is difficult, and various adjuvants usually need to be administered, resulting in a cocktail of drugs. In a clinical setting, the vast majority of patients are unaware of surgery being carried out and have no memory of it, so they can claim to have felt no pain, but this is much more difficult to demonstrate in invertebrates. Here, we show that 1% MgCl2, a muscle relaxant, is a useful adjuvant for the clinical anaesthetic isoflurane on Octopus vulgaris when applied alone in seawater for 10 min before the clinical anaesthetic. After this, full anaesthesia can be achieved in 5 min using 1% isoflurane insufflated into the saline still containing MgCl2. Full recovery takes place rapidly in about 10 to 15 min. The depth of anaesthesia was monitored using changes in respiratory rate, chromatophore pattern, and withdrawal movements of the arms and siphon. This methodology reduces stress on the animal and minimises the quantity of anaesthetic used.

Cervical cancer screening by high risk HPV testing in routine practice: results at one year recall of high risk HPV-positive and cytology-negative women.

OBJECTIVE: Cervical cancer screening by human papillomavirus (HPV) testing requires the use of additional triage and follow-up analyses. We evaluated women's compliance with and the performance of this strategy in a routine setting. SETTING: Five cervical service screening programmes in North-East Italy. METHODS: Eligible women aged 25-64 invited for a new screening episode underwent HPV testing for high risk types (hrHPV by Hybrid Capture 2) and cytology triage. Women with positive HPV and cytology results were referred for colposcopy; women with positive HPV but negative cytology results were referred to 1-year repeat hrHPV testing. RESULTS: Of 46,694 women screened by HPV testing up to December 2011, 3,211 (6.9%) tested hrHPV positive; 45% of these had a positive triage cytology. Those with negative cytology were invited for 1-yr repeat testing. Compliance with invitation was 61.6% at baseline and 85.3% at 1-yr repeat. Rate of persistent hrHPV positivity was 58% (830/1,435). Colposcopy performed in women with a positive hrHPV test at 1-yr repeat accounted for 36% of all colposcopies performed within the screening programmes. Cumulatively, a histological high-grade lesion was detected in 276 women (5.9‰ detection rate), 234 at baseline (85%), and 42 (15%) at 1-yr repeat. CONCLUSIONS: Compliance with hrHPV-based screening programmes was high both at baseline and at 1-yr repeat. Compared with the randomized trials, a higher proportion of triage cytology was read as positive, and only a small number of high-grade lesions were detected among the group of hrHPV positive cytology negative women who repeated testing 1-yr after baseline.