Fig. 1.
Direct immune modulations by volatile anesthetics (VAs). Depicted here are immune cells responsible for the innate (shaded) and adaptive (unshaded) immunity. VAs have been shown to suppress innate immunity by impairing or suppressing neutrophil adhesion, monocytes, macrophages and natural killer (NK) cells and affecting resident cells in tissues, such as platelets and microglial cells. VAs also suppress adaptive immunity by decreasing lymphocyte proliferation, such as cluster of differentiation (CD) 4 positive (CD4+) and 8 positive (CD8+) T cells as well as B cells. Note that VAs can have both inhibition (shown as a line with a dot) and potentiation (shown as a line with an arrowhead) effects on macrophages, depending on the site of infection or inflammation. Ag = antigen; Th1 = T helper cell type 1; Th2 = T helper cell type 2; Th17 = T helper cell type 17.