Aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) is an essential enzyme in the synthesis of serotonin, dopamine, and certain trace amines and is present in a variety of organs including the brain and spinal cord. It is previously reported that in mammalian spinal cord AADC cells (called D-cells) were largely confined to a region around the central canal and that they do not produce monoamines. To dat...

The main form of locomotion in the lamprey (a lower vertebrate, cyclostome) is forward swimming (FS) based on periodical waves of lateral body flexion propagating from head to tail. The lamprey is also capable of backward swimming (BS). Here we describe the kinematical and electromyographic (EMG) pattern of BS, as well as the effects on this pattern exerted by different lesions of the spinal co...

BACKGROUND Injury to the spine and spinal cord is one of the common cause of disability and death. Several factors affect the outcome; but which are these factors (alone and in combination), are determining the outcomes are still unknown. The aim of the study was to evaluate the factors influencing the outcome following acute cervical spine injury. MATERIALS AND METHODS A prospective observat...

OBJECTIVES The sympathetic skin response (SSR) is a technique to assess the sympathetic cholinergic pathways, and it can be used to study the central sympathetic pathways in spinal cord injury (SCI). This study investigated the capacity of the isolated spinal cord to generate an SSR, and determined the relation between SSR, levels of spinal cord lesion, and supraspinal connections. METHODS Pa...

We examined the coordination between right and left hindlimbs during voluntary forward swimming in adult red-eared turtles, before and after midsagittal section of the spinal cord hindlimb enlargement (segments D8-S2) or the enlargement plus the first preenlargement segment (D7-S2). Our purpose was to assess the role of crossed commissural axons in these segments for right-left hindlimb alterna...

Functional MRI (fMRI) imaging of motoneuron activity in the human spinal cord is still in its infancy, and it will remain difficult to apply to walking. Here we present a viable alternative for documenting the spatiotemporal maps of alpha-motorneuron (MN) activity in the human spinal cord during walking, similar to the method recently reported for the cat. We recorded EMG activity from 16 to 32...

treatment of spinal cord injury by exogenous cells has brought both successful and unsuccessful results. olfactory ensheathing cells and schwann cells have been widely used for transplantation purposes. in this study, we investigated the effects of these cells on contused spinal cord by introducing cells into subarachnoid space. fifty thousand schwann cells or olfactory ensheathing cells or a m...

Traditionally, the spinal cord is isolated by laminectomy, i.e. by breaking open the spinal vertebrae one at a time. This is both time consuming and may result in damage to the spinal cord caused by the dissection process. Here, we show how the spinal cord can be extruded using hydraulic pressure. Handling time is significantly reduced to only a few minutes, likely decreasing protein damage. Th...

objective: spinal cord injury (sci) causes inflammation, deformity and cell loss. it has been shown that melissa officinalis (mo), as herbal medicine, and dexamethasone (dex) are useful in the prevention of various neurological diseases. the present study evaluated combinational effects of dex and mo on spinal cord injury. materials and methods: thirty six adult male wistar rats were used in th...

The cellular and network basis for most vertebrate locomotor central pattern generators (CPGs) is incompletely characterized, but organizational models based on known CPG architectures have been proposed. Segmental models propose that each spinal segment contains a circuit that controls local coordination and sends longer projections to coordinate activity between segments. Unsegmented/continuo...