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Dr James Sleigh
- Position:
- Professor of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care
- Field:
- Anaesthesia
- Organisation:
- Waikato Clinical School
Dr James Sleigh is the inaugural recipient of the Kudo for Medical Science, sponsored by the Waikato District Health Board.
Dr Sleigh’s research has focused on the understanding of how general anaesthetic drugs induce unconsciousness and how to quantify the drugs’ effects.
His work can be directly applied to the clinical practice of anaesthesia. At the level of pure science, Dr Sleigh’s study of anaesthesia is also a window into understanding the neuroscience of consciousness.
In association with physicists Dr Moira Steyn-Ross, Dr Alistair Steyn-Ross and Dr Marcus Wilson, he has helped developed the Cortical Modelling Group at the University of Waikato. The team developed a model that successfully describes the EEG features of the transitions between the alert state and the states of general anaesthesia, sleep and seizures. This has enabled the development of monitors that can be used in the clinical environment to monitor depth of anaesthesia.
The model developed by Dr Sleigh and his team also explains the puzzling observation that general anaesthetic drugs – which are often used to treat seizures – can themselves occasionally induce seizures.
Practically, through his work, his team also hopes to eliminate the rare, but devastating, problem of patient awareness when under general anaesthesia.
Follow this link to the Kudos website to see the 2007 Award winners: www.thekudos.org.nz/2007winners.html
This article is based on information current in 2008.
