The Ejtm Specials “The Long-Term Denervated Muscle”

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (by-nc 3.0) which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited-3-Editorial The Ejtm Specials " The long-term denervated muscle " The first Issue of the Journal of Translational Myology/Basic Applied Myology Vol. 24 (1), 2014 belongs to the Ejtm Specials on " The long-term denervated muscle ". It is dedicated to pioneers and followers of biology, physiology, pathology, therapy and rehabilitation of the permanent denervated muscle, in particular to the physical approaches for the diagnosis and treatments in those cases in which the hope for reinnervation is very poor or lost. Although some study may be found in the literature of the Nineteenth Century, 1 it was in the 1940s that the study of events occurring in denervated muscle fibers emerged as a topic distinct from the more clinical relevant studies of nerve regeneration and muscle reinnervation. 2-4 During the following twenty years, the reports increased in numbers year after year. Finally in 1962 the book edited by Ernest Gutmann summarized previous knowledge from biology to rehabilitation by electrical stimulation and opened the modern era of " The Denervated Muscle ". 5 Three pioneers of the modern studies are contributing to the Ejtm Specials and/or lectured at the 2014Spring PaduaMuscleDays: 1. Bruce M. Carlson, co-author of several papers with Ernest Gutmann on regeneration of transplanted muscles, opens the Ejtm Specials with the review " The biology of long-term denervated skeletal muscle ". 6 He offers to researches the basic concepts and the results to understand problems and actual or future solutions that continue to nurture Translational Myology; 2. Terje Lømo was the first in 1972 to electrically stimulate denervated rat muscle to test the hypothesis that induced activity modifies muscle properties and indeed he demonstrated that it suppress one of the hallmarks of muscle fiber denervation, i.e., ACh sensitivity spreading from the synaptic area to the whole sarcolemma. 7 Prior to 1972, it was believed that neurotrophic factors, not related to excitatory impulse transmission, played a role in spontaneous fibrillation, another functional marker of muscle denervation, whose appearance is inversely related to the length of the degenerating nerve stump. Lømo and co-workers demonstrated, instead, that chronic electrical stimulation of denervated rat muscles caused ACh-sensitivity to disappear from denervated muscles already ACh supersensitive. Further, he showed that …