Melatonin attenuates muscle sympathetic nerve responses to sympathoexcitatory stimuli, but it is unknown whether melatonin similarly attenuates reflex changes in skin sympathetic nerve activity (SSNA). In this double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study, we tested the hypothesis that melatonin (3 mg) would attenuate the SSNA response to mental stress (mental arithmetic). Twelve healthy su...

Study was conducted on 34 middle aged (35-52 years) diabetics of either sex to compare autonomic function in patients having and not having symptoms of dysautonomia. Fifteen age/sex matched healthy non-diabetic volunteers were control. No symptom of autonomic insufficiency was present in 19 (55.8%) while 15 (43%) diabetics had dysfunction in form of episodic syncope, vertigo, and palpitation, a...

Sympathetic skin response (SSR) is a reflexly elicited potential of the sweat glands, the afferent and efferent fibres of the reflex are cutaneous sensory fibres (if the SSR is elicited by electrical stimulus) and sympathetic sudomotor fibres respectively. Our earlier study indicated that latency, besides duration and amplitude, of SSR of a given normal individual showed significant variations ...

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...

It is well known that the size of the sympathetic skin response (SSR) depends on the stimulus strength. In the present investigation train stimuli (TS) were employed to study the behavior of the SSR when recruited above the usual level. The SSR was obtained in healthy human subjects over the palm of the hand after supramaximal single stimuli (SS) and trains of three (TS; interstimulus interval ...

The sympathetic skin response (SSR) is considered as one of the indexes of autonomic nervous system functions, especially related with the sudomotor function of unmyelinated sympathetic fibers. SSRs are recorded as the potentials with biphasic or multiphasic waveforms by conventional electromyography. SSRs are evaluated by measuring latency (time from the stimulus to the onset), amplitude, and ...

In human skin, the vasodilator response to local heating includes a sensory nerve-dependent peak followed by a nadir and then a slower, nitric oxide-mediated, endothelium-dependent vasodilation. To investigate whether chronic sympathectomy diminishes this endothelium-dependent vasodilation, we studied individuals who had previously undergone surgical T(2) sympathectomy (n = 9) and a group of he...

Endosomatic electrodermal activity (skin potential level, skin potential response and latency) as an indirect indicator of sympathetic nervous system activity was measured in 22 trained athletes during resting and after acute exercise. The aim of this study was to investigate the difference in skin potential parameters in trained atheletes before and after acute exercise on a bicycle ergometer....