In patients with myasthenia gravis neuromuscular transmission has been tested in individual hypothenar and thenar motor units using trains of near threshold electrical stimuli delivered to the motor nerve. The most important observations included: (1) the proportion of motor units with pathological decrements varied from 0 to 90%, (2) the decrements in surface voltage were frequently much more ...

Patellofemoral dysfunction is a fairly common deficiency among young individuals that primarily affects females and may be characterized by pain, swelling and retropatellar crepitation. The purpose of this review of literature from the period between 2005 and 2011 was to systematize knowledge in relation to the increase in quadriceps muscle strength and pain relief in patients with patellofemor...

The function of the neuromuscular junction in children is amenable to electrophysiological testing. Of the two tests available, repetitive nerve stimulation is uncomfortable and has a reduced sensitivity compared with single-fibre methodology. The latter is the method of choice, recording the variability in neuromuscular transmission as a value called jitter. It can be performed by voluntary ac...

Facilitation in neuromuscular junction of frog, i. e. successive enhancement of muscle action potential by repetitive stimulation, has been considered to be due to the recruitment of numbers of muscle fibres excited through junctions. It has been generally accepted that no neuromuscular facilitation is observed in the mammalian junctions (BROWN and HARVEY, 1941), except in curarized or fatigued...

Mammalian neuromuscular junctions are useful model synapses to study the relationship between synaptic structure and function, although these have rarely been studied together at the same synapses. To do this, we generated transgenic lines of mice in which the thy1.2 promoter drives expression of synaptopHluorin (spH) as a means of optically measuring synaptic vesicle distribution and release. ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE After stroke, many individuals have chronic unilateral motor dysfunction in the upper extremity that severely limits their functional movement control. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of electromyography-triggered neuromuscular electrical stimulation on the wrist and finger extension muscles in individuals who had a stroke > or = 1 year earlier. ME...

We studied the development of selective adrenergic and cholinergic neuroeffector transmission in primary cultures of isolated ventricular muscle cells. Explants of either thoracolumbar sympathetic ganglia or sacrococcygeal spinal cord were added to newborn rat ventricular cultures harvested prior to the onset of in vivo autonomic innervation. Neuronal growth, migration, and the formation of neu...

Electrical stimulation (1-ms pulses, 100 Hz) produces more torque than expected from motor axon activation (extra contractions). This experiment investigates the most effective method of delivering this stimulation for neuromuscular electrical stimulation. Surface stimulation (1-ms pulses; 20 Hz for 2 s, 100 Hz for 2 s, 20 Hz for 3 s) was delivered to triceps surae and wrist flexors (muscle sti...

Neuromuscular stimulation via the sacral nerve roots is proposed for prevention of ischial pressure ulcers following a spinal cord injury (SCI). Acute effects of sacral functional magnetic stimulation (FMS) on seat interface pressure changes were investigated in five nondisabled volunteers. Similar effects were demonstrated with functional electrical stimulation in people with SCI who used a sa...

Understanding the torque output behavior of paralyzed muscle has important implications for the use of functional neuromuscular electrical stimulation systems. Postfatigue potentiation is an augmentation of peak muscle torque during repetitive activation after a fatigue protocol. The purposes of this study were 1) to quantify postfatigue potentiation in the acutely and chronically paralyzed sol...