Abstract
There is insufficient unified research on the effects of propofol and dexmedetomidine on brain functional activity and synchronization. We collected resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 21 healthy subjects in four different levels of consciousness induced by propofol (awake, mild sedation, deep sedation, and recovery), and other 21 healthy subjects in three different levels of consciousness induced by dexmedetomidine (awake, mild sedation and recovery). The results showed that with the increasing of sedation levels of propofol or dexmedetomidine, fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations and regional homogeneity values decreased in the frontal lobe, while they increased in the superior temporal gyrus and paracentral lobule. Under propofol sedation, functional connectivity (FC) decreased both within and between sensorimotor network and attention network, and within and between the frontoparietal network (FPN) and default mode network (DMN). Simultaneously, a small number of increased connections were observed between the FPN, DMN, and other networks. Under dexmedetomidine sedation, generally decreased FC was observed in the whole brain. This study shows consistent effects on brain functional activity, but distinct impacts on functional synchronization, providing new insights into the understanding of anesthetic mechanisms.
Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
References
Brown, E. N., Lydic, R. & Schiff, N. D. General anesthesia, sleep, and coma. N. Engl. J. Med. 363, 2638–2650 (2010).
Rudolph, U. & Antkowiak, B. Molecular and neuronal substrates for general anaesthetics. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 5, 709–720 (2004).
Brown, E. N., Purdon, P. L. & Van Dort, C. J. General anesthesia and altered states of arousal: a systems neuroscience analysis. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 34, 601–628 (2011).
Correa-Sales, C., Rabin, B. C. & Maze, M. A hypnotic response to dexmedetomidine, an alpha 2 agonist, is mediated in the locus coeruleus in rats. Anesthesiology 76, 948–952 (1992).
Jorm, C. & Stamford, J. Actions of the hypnotic anaesthetic, dexmedetomidine, on noradrenaline release and cell firing in rat locus coeruleus slices. BJA: Br. J. Anaesth. 71, 447–449 (1993).
Biswal, B. B. Resting state fMRI: a personal history. Neuroimage 62, 938–944 (2012).
Lv, P. et al. Dose-dependent effects of isoflurane on regional activity and neural network function: a resting-state fMRI study of 14 rhesus monkeys: an observational study. Neurosci. Lett. 611, 116–122 (2016).
Zou, Q-H. et al. An improved approach to detection of amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) for resting-state fMRI: fractional ALFF. J. Neurosci. Methods. 172, 137–141 (2008).
Zang, Y., Jiang, T., Lu, Y., He, Y. & Tian, L. Regional homogeneity approach to fMRI data analysis. Neuroimage 22, 394–400 (2004).
Boveroux, P. et al. Breakdown of within-and between-network resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging connectivity during propofol-induced loss of consciousness. J. Am. Soc. Anesthesiologists. 113, 1038–1053 (2010).
Liu, X. et al. Propofol attenuates low-frequency fluctuations of resting-state fMRI BOLD signal in the anterior frontal cortex upon loss of consciousness. Neuroimage 147, 295–301 (2017).
Fotiadis, P. et al. Changes in brain connectivity and neurovascular dynamics during dexmedetomidine-induced loss of consciousness. bioRxiv 2024 (10), 04–616650 (2024).
Hashmi, J. A., Loggia, M. L., Khan, S., Gao, L. & Akeju, O. Dexmedetomidine Disrupts the Local and Global Efficiencies of Large-scale Brain Networks. Anesthesiology 126, 1 (2017).
Akeju, O. et al. A comparison of propofol-and dexmedetomidine-induced electroencephalogram dynamics using spectral and coherence analysis. Anesthesiology 121, 978 (2014).
Baars, B. J. Global workspace theory of consciousness: toward a cognitive neuroscience of human experience. Prog. Brain Res. 150, 45–53 (2005).
Miller, B. L. & Cummings, J. L. The human frontal lobes: Functions and disorders (Guilford, 2017).
Guldenmund, P. et al. Propofol-induced frontal cortex disconnection: a study of resting-state networks, total brain connectivity, and mean BOLD signal oscillation frequencies. Brain Connect. 6, 225–237 (2016).
Fell, J., Widman, G., Rehberg, B., Elger, C. E. & Fernández, G. Human mediotemporal EEG characteristics during propofol anesthesia. Biol. Cybern. 92, 92–100 (2005).
Gross, W. L. et al. Propofol sedation alters perceptual and cognitive functions in healthy volunteers as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Anesthesiology 131, 254–265 (2019).
Guldenmund, P. et al. Brain functional connectivity differentiates dexmedetomidine from propofol and natural sleep. BJA: Br. J. Anaesth. 119, 674–684 (2017).
Malekmohammadi, M. et al. Propofol-induced changes in α-β sensorimotor cortical connectivity. Anesthesiology 128, 305–316 (2018).
Wang, S. et al. Reorganization of rich-clubs in functional brain networks during propofol-induced unconsciousness and natural sleep, Vol. 25, 102188 (Clinical, 2020).
Craig, M. M. et al. Propofol sedation-induced alterations in brain connectivity reflect parvalbumin interneurone distribution in human cerebral cortex. Br. J. Anaesth. 126, 835–844 (2021).
Gómez, F. et al. Changes in Effective Connectivity by Propofol Sedation. PLoS ONE. 8, e71370 (2013).
Horovitz, S.G. et al. Decoupling of the brain’s default mode network during deep sleep. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 106, 11376–11381 (2009).
Xu, K., Liu, Y., Zhan, Y., Ren, J. & Jiang, T. BRANT: A Versatile and Extendable Resting-State fMRI Toolkit. Front. Neuroinformatics ; 12 (2018).
Zuo, X-N. et al. Toward reliable characterization of functional homogeneity in the human brain: preprocessing, scan duration, imaging resolution and computational space. Neuroimage 65, 374–386 (2013).
Lingzhong, F. et al. The Human Brainnetome Atlas: A New Brain Atlas Based on Connectional Architecture. Cereb. Cortex. 26, 3508–3526 (2016).
Jin, D. et al. Grab-AD: generalizability and reproducibility of altered brain activity and diagnostic classification in Alzheimer’s disease. Hum. Brain. Mapp. 41, 3379–3391 (2020).
Yan, C. G., Wang, X. D., Zuo, X. N. & Zang, Y. F. DPABI: Data Processing & Analysis for (Resting-State). Brain Imaging Neuroinformatics. 14, 339–351 (2016).
Acknowledgements
We sincerely appreciate all the participants who took part in this study. Their time, effort, and cooperation were invaluable to this research.
Funding
We acknowledge funding provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 82371910, 61901465, 82271284) and the Beijing Hospital Management Center Youth Talent Development Program “Young Sprouts” (QML20230509).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
L.H conceived and designed the study and supervised the entire research process. J.M, L.G, H.R, W.C, L.F, L.Y and W.X collected the raw data and performed the experiments. Z.J and Z.F analyzed the MRI data. J.M, H.R and Z.R secured the funding. J.M and Z.J drafted the manuscript. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Disclosures
The authors report no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Minyu, J., Jiayi, Z., Guiyu, L. et al. Propofol and dexmedetomidine sedation share the similar functional activity but distinct functional synchronization. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-40974-w
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-40974-w
