Although chronic pain is the most common symptom of arthritis, relatively little is known about the mechanisms driving it. Recently, a sprouting of autonomic sympathetic fibers into the upper dermis of the skin, an area that is normally devoid of them, was found in the skin following chronic inflammation of the rat hindpaw. While this sprouting only occurred when signs of joint and bone damage ...

When a subject is heated, the stimulation of temperature-sensitive nerve endings in the skin, and the raising of the central body temperature, results in the reflex release of sympathetic vasoconstrictor tone in the skin of the extremities, causing a measurable temperature increase at the site of release. In the sympathetic release test, the subject is gently heated by placing the feet and calv...

Vogel et al. propose that the BP recovery time following phase III of the Valsalva maneuver is a useful index of sympathetic function, particularly in patients with severe sympathetic adrenergic dysfunction. Clinical evaluation of the sympathetic nervous system usually entails the use of tests that indirectly measure autonomic function. The assessment of muscle sympathetic nerve activity with m...

OBJECTIVE To quantify the sympathetic nervous system response to acupuncture and non-penetrating sham acupuncture in volunteers with pain. METHODS A single-blind, randomised controlled study of 36 healthy adults with no recent participation in forearm strengthening or occupations involving repeated forceful wrist motion was carried out. A fatiguing wrist extension exercise protocol was comple...

OBJECTIVE To examine the effect of kangaroo care on heart rate variability in a healthy preterm infant. DESIGN Case study. SETTING Private room on a postpartum unit. PARTICIPANT A mother-preterm infant dyad. INTERVENTION Kangaroo (skin-to-skin) care. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Heart rate variability, a noninvasive measurement of the sympathetic and parasympathetic components of the autonomi...

While sympathetic nerve activity (SNA) is important in cardiac arrhythmogenesis, no methods exist to record SNA non-invasively ambulatory animals. The objective demonstrate that simultaneous non-invasive recording of skin (SKNA) and ECG feasible normal rabbits

The amygdala plays a crucial role in evaluating the emotional significance of stimuli and in transforming the results of this evaluation into appropriate autonomic responses. Lesion and stimulation studies suggest involvement of the amygdala in the generation of the skin conductance response (SCR), which is an indirect measure of autonomic activity that has been associated with both emotion and...

Acupuncture is a therapeutic technique and part of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Acupuncture has clinical efficacy on various autonomic nerve-related disorders, such as cardiovascular diseases, epilepsy, anxiety and nervousness, circadian rhythm disorders, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and subfertility. An increasing number of studies have demonstrated that acupuncture can control auto...

Immune tissues are known to be innervated by the sympathetic nervous system, but little is known of what directs the innervation to specific tissue compartments. This report examines the sympathetic innervation of immune tissues in transgenic mice that overexpress nerve growth factor (NGF) in skin and other epithelial structures. NGF transgenic mice exhibited dramatic hyperinnervation in the sp...