Four patients are described with destructive rheumatoid arthritis of the cervical spine and neurogenic wasting of forearm and hand muscles. The pathological connection is not immediately obvious, but a relationship between these two observations is described here with clinical, radiological, electrophysiological and necropsy findings. Compression of the anterior spinal artery at upper and mid-c...

Recent results in spinal research are challenging the historical view that the spinal reflexes are mostly hardwired and fixed behaviours. In previous work we have shown that three of the simplest spinal reflexes could be self-organised in an agonist-antagonist pair of muscles. The simplicity of these reflexes is given from the fact that they entail at most one interneuron mediating the connecti...

Sexual differentiation occurs prenatally in guinea pigs but extends into the postnatal period in rats. Steroids affect the development of two motoneuron nuclei of the rat lumbar spinal cord that innervate sexually dimorphic perineal muscles. The spinal nucleus of the bulbocavernosus (SNB) innervates the bulbocavernosus (BC) and levator ani (LA) muscles while the dorsolateral nucleus (DLN) inner...

Transcutaneous and epidural electrical spinal cord stimulation techniques are becoming more valuable as electrophysiological and clinical tools. Recently, we observed selective activation of proximal and distal motor pools during epidural spinal stimulation. In the present study, we hypothesized that the characteristics of recruitment curves obtained from leg muscles will reflect a relative pre...

INTRODUCTION Denervation of the paraspinal muscles in spinal disorders is frequently attributed to radiculopathy. Therefore, patients with lumbar spinal stenosis causing asymmetrical symptoms should have asymmetrical paraspinal denervation. METHODS Seventy-three patients with clinical lumbar spinal stenosis, aged 55-85 years, completed a pain drawing and underwent masked electrodiagnostic tes...

It is shown that the statistical analysis of the sEMG signals recorded by the ChiroSensors along the paraspinal muscles during Network Spinal Analysis (NSA) provides objective confirmation of the physiological reality as perceived by the practitioner as it relates to levels of care and spinal injury recovery.

Autonomic dysreflexia (ADR) is a syndrome of imbalanced reflex sympathetic discharge occurring in patients with spinal cord injury (SCI) at or above the level of splanchnic sympathetic outflow (T6). We present the case of a 29 year-old, gravida 3, para 1 Caucasian female at 28 weeks gestation, with a history of T3 SCI secondary to a gunshot wound 9 years prior, who developed ADR during preterm ...