Do Men Feel the Effects of Laughing Gas More Than Women?

Pharmacodynamics, is a division of pharmacology that studies the effects of drugs and their mechanisms of action in the body and pharmacokinetics is the division of pharmacology that studies the absorption, distribution, and localization of drugs in the body.  Pharmacodynamics is often summarized as the study of what a drug does to the body, whereas pharmacokinetics is the study of what the body does to a drug.

The Benefits of Nitrous Oxide Sedation

1. Increase patient comfort and enjoyment
2. Safe and effective
3. Potential practice building tool
4. Short recovery time
5. Short duration of onset
6. Easy to administer

The Department of Anesthesiology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina believes that gender appears to be an important variable in recovery from general anesthesia. These findings may explain the increased reported incidence of awareness in women and support the need to include gender as a variable in pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies of anesthetic drugs.

Even though gender could make a difference in the conclusion of studies using nitrous oxide, it appears that gender doesn't make much difference.  I could only find one study observing the after effects of nitrous oxide, only using men, which took place at the Service de Physiologie-Explorations Fonctionnelles, Hôpital Henri Mondor, Creteil, France and the hospital study found that Nitrous oxide can induce central and obstructive sleep apneas.

The Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care at The University of Chicago states that there does not appear to be differences in how male and female healthy volunteers report feeling from the effects of 30% N₂O.


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