Abstract
Incomplete cervical lesion is the most common type of human spinal cord injury (SCI) and causes permanent paresis of arm muscles, a phenomenon still incompletely understood in physiopathological and neuroanatomical terms. We performed spinal cord hemisections in adult rats at the caudal part of the segment C6, and analysed the forces and kinematics of locomotion up to four months post-injury to determine the nature of motor function loss and recovery. A severe (50 %), immediate and permanent loss of extensor force occurred in the forelimb but not in the hindlimb of the injured side, accompanied by elbow and wrist kinematic impairments and early adaptations of whole-body movements that initially compensated the balance but changed continuously over the follow-up period to allow effective locomotion.
This work was sponsored by the Consejería de Sanidad de Castilla La Mancha (Grant PN 04021).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Alexander, R.M.: Principles of Animal Locomotion. Princeton UP, New Jersey (2002)
Collazos-Castro, J.E., López-Dolado, E., Nieto-Sampedro, M.: Locomotor deficits and adaptive mechanisms after thoracic spinal cord contusion in the adult rat. J. Neurotrauma 23, 1–17 (2006)
Collazos-Castro, J.E., Soto, V.M., Gutierrez-Davila, M., Nieto-Sampedro, M.: Motoneuron loss associated with chronic locomotion impairments after spinal cord contusion. J. Neurotrauma 22, 544–558 (2005)
Courtine, G., Song, B., Roy, R.R., Zhong, H., Herrmann, J.E., Ao, Y., Qi, J., Edgerton, V.R., Sofroniew, M.V.: Recovery of supraspinal control of stepping via indirect propriospinal relay connections after spinal cord injury. Nat. Med. 14, 69–74 (2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
López-Dolado, E., Collazos-Castro, J.E. (2013). Forelimb Force Deficits and Whole Body Compensations after Rat Cervical Spinal Hemisection. In: Pons, J., Torricelli, D., Pajaro, M. (eds) Converging Clinical and Engineering Research on Neurorehabilitation. Biosystems & Biorobotics, vol 1. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34546-3_175
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34546-3_175
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-34545-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-34546-3
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)