Hiccups are the sudden involuntary contractions of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles. They are generally benign and self-limited, however, in some cases they are chronic and debilitating. There are approximately 4000 admissions for hiccups each year in the United States. The hiccup reflex arc is composed of three components: (1) an afferent limb including the phrenic, vagus, and sympathetic...

A 71-year-old man was scheduled to undergo cardiac resynchronization therapy device (CRTD) implantation. He was combined with severe chronic heart failure due to ischemic heart disease. NYHA class was 3 to 4 and electrocardiogram showed non-sustained ventricular. Ejection fraction was about 20% revealed by transthoracic echocardiogram. He was also on several anticoagulation medications. We plan...

Thoracotomy causes severe postoperative pain, which is difficult to manage since the use of systemic analgesics often causes respiratory depression. Cryoanalgesia of the intercostal nerves has been advocated as an effective means of local analgesia without serious side effects. A prospective randomised blind trial to investigate the efficacy of the technique was carried out. A total of 53 patie...

A rare case of three muscle anomalies in the pectoral region was discovered during routine dissection of an 85-year-old female cadaver. The muscle anomalies include the congenital partial absence of the pectoralis major muscle, a sternalis muscle, and a pectoralis quartus muscle. All three variants presented on the right side. The pectoralis major muscle demonstrated a normal clavicular head bu...

We previously generated a monoclonal antibody (mAb), ROCA1, which binds preferentially to rostral versus caudal sympathetic ganglia and intercostal nerves. Two other mAbs, ROCA2 and B2C11, bind to the same structures but not in rostrocaudal gradients. All three mAbs recognize a 26 kDa cell surface protein. Amino acid sequence data obtained from the affinity purified 26 kDa protein showed some h...

54 Internal intercostal and abdominal motoneurons are strongly co-activated during expiration. We 55 investigated whether that synergy was paralleled by synergistic Group I reflex excitation. Intracellular 56 recordings were made from motoneurons of the internal intercostal nerve of T8 in anesthetized cats and the 57 specificity of the monosynaptic connections from afferents in each of the two ...

POURFOUR DU PETIT iS of interest in the history of neuroanatomy for his observations and controlled experiments which led to the correction of the earlier view that the 'intercostal nerve' is of cranial origin. The so-called intercostal nerve was the name which had been given by Thomas Willis to the sympathetic chain. This, of course, is one of the two divisions of the autonomic system which in...