Anesthesia rapidly suppresses insulin pulse mass but enhances the orderliness of insulin secretory process

1 Department of Comparative Medicine, East Carolina School of Medicine, Greenville, North Carolina 27858; 2 Department of Medicine and National Science Foundation Center for Biological Timing, Charlottesville, Virginia 22908; and 3 Division of Endocrinology and Diabetes, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90033 Induction of anesthesia is accompanied by modest hyperglycemia and a decreased plasma insulin concentration. Most insulin is secreted in discrete pulses occurring at ~6- to 8-min intervals. We sought to test the hypothesis that anesthesia inhibits insulin release by disrupting pulsatile insulin secretion in a canine model by use of direct portal vein sampling. We report that induction of anesthesia causes an abrupt decrease in the insulin secretion rate (1.1 ± 0.2 vs. 0.7 ± 0.1 pmol · kg 1 · min 1 , P