Seminar Series: When Anesthesia Meets Space – Dr Matthew Turnock

Seminar Series: When Anesthesia Meets Space – Dr Matthew Turnock is organized by British columbia anesthesiologists society and will be held on Sep 28, 2026.

Description:
As human spaceflight transitions to long-duration deep space exploration, the question of surgical care beyond Earth is no longer hypothetical. Astronauts on multi-year missions may require anesthesia in an environment fundamentally unlike anything in terrestrial practice.

Microgravity produces profound physiologic changes directly relevant to anesthetic management, including cephalad fluid shifts, cardiovascular deconditioning, and altered autonomic regulation, challenging our assumptions about airway anatomy, hemodynamic reserve, and drug behavior.

This presentation explores airway management, regional anesthesia, and spinal anesthesia in microgravity. A particular focus is the under-recognized problem that baricity-dependent mechanisms governing intrathecal drug spread on Earth may fail entirely when gravity disappears, the basis of a UBC research program using parabolic flight experiments to study anesthetic behaviour in weightlessness.