Psychological stress, an evolutionary adaptation to the fight-or-flight response, triggers a number of physiological responses that can be deleterious under some circumstances. Stress signals activate the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the sympathetic nervous system. Elements derived from those systems (e.g., cortisol, catecholamines and neuropeptides) can impact the immune syste...

AIM To evaluate whether spontaneous skin conductance activity is an objective method for measuring the stress response to painful stimuli in premature infants. The number and amplitude of the waves and the baseline increase with the activity of the sympathetic nervous system. METHODS In 20 preterm infants of gestational age >/= 29 weeks, behavioural state and spontaneous skin conductance acti...

The autonomic nervous system maintains internal homeostasis by regulating cardiovascular, thermoregulatory, gastrointestinal, genitourinary, exocrine, and pupillary function. Testing and quantifying autonomic nervous system function is an important but difficult area of clinical neurophysiology. Tests of parasympathetic cardiovagal regulation include heart rate analysis during standing (the 30:...

NINOMIYA, ISHIO, AYA IRISAWA, AND NAOKO NISIMARU. Nonuniformity of sympathetic nerve activity to the skin and kidney. Am. J. Physiol. 224(Z) : 256-264. 1973.-The effects of baroceptor reflex on the sympathetic nerve activity (SNA) to the skin and kidney were compared in anesthetized cats. Grouped SNA synchronous with cardiac cycle and respiration was not the major pattern in the skin nerve. Wit...

OBJECTIVE Although specific temperaments have been known to be related to autonomic nervous function in some psychiatric disorders, there are few studies that have examined the relationship between temperaments and autonomic nervous function in a normal population. In this study, we examined the effect of temperament on the sympathetic nervous function in a normal population. METHODS Sixty ei...

Anticipatory skin conductance responses [SCRs] are a widely used measure of aversive conditioning in humans. Here, we describe a dynamic causal model [DCM] of how anticipatory, evoked, and spontaneous skin conductance changes are generated by sudomotor nerve activity. Inversion of this model, using variational Bayes, provides a means of inferring the most likely sympathetic nerve activity, give...

OBJECTIVES Spinal manual therapy (SMT) is commonly used for treatment of musculoskeletal pain in the neck, upper back, or upper extremity. Some authors report a multi-system effect of SMT, including peripheral alterations in skin conductance and skin temperature, suggesting that SMT may initiate a sympathetic nervous system (SNS) response. The focus of this evidence-based review and meta-analys...

The thermoregulatory control of human skin blood flow is vital to the maintenance of normal body temperatures during challenges to thermal homeostasis. Sympathetic neural control of skin blood flow includes the noradrenergic vasoconstrictor system and a sympathetic active vasodilator system, the latter of which is responsible for 80% to 90% of the substantial cutaneous vasodilation that occurs ...

exposure to stress leads to physiological changes called “stress response” which are the result of the changes in the adrenomedullary hormone system, hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (hpa) and sympathetic nervous system (sns) activity. in the present study, the effects of chronic physical and psychological stress and also the role of sympathetic system effects in stress on ischemia/reperfusion (i...