In the human upper limb a proportion of the descending corticospinal command may be relayed through cervical propriospinal premotoneurons. This may serve to coordinate movements involving multiple joints of the arm, such as reaching. The present study was conducted to determine whether a shoulder stabilizing muscle, infraspinatus (INF), is functionally integrated into the putative cervical prop...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether the pattern of brain activation induced by a motor task and the motor responses to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) have prognostic implications for motor recovery after stroke. METHOD Ten patients with first-ever subcortical stroke (55.7±17.3 years, 5 ischemic and 5 hemorrhagic) underwent 2 FDG PET studies under different conditions (1: rest, 2: activation...

Observation of snapshots depicting ongoing motor acts increases corticospinal motor excitability. Such motor facilitation indexes the anticipatory simulation of observed (implied) actions and likely reflects computations occurring in the parietofrontal nodes of a cortical network subserving action perception (action observation network, AON). However, direct evidence for the active role of AON ...

Unloading of the baroreceptors due to orthostatic stress increases corticospinal excitability. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of baroreceptor unloading due to orthostatic stress on intracortical excitatory and inhibitory pathways in the motor cortex. With transcranial magnetic stimulation, measures of intracortical excitability for a hand muscle were tested on 2 days in he...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The cerebellum has an influence on motor excitability. We investigated if the location of a cerebellar infarction was crucial for changes of motor cortex excitability and if the electrophysiological findings were correlated with motor performance. METHODS Transcranial magnetic stimulation was applied to study intracortical inhibition (ICI), intracortical facilitation (I...

A large body of research reports that perceiving body movements of other people activates motor representations in the observer's brain. This automatic resonance mechanism appears to be imitative in nature. However, action observation does not inevitably lead to symmetrical motor facilitation: Mirroring the observed movement might be disadvantageous for successfully performing joint actions. Wh...

UNLABELLED Previous anatomical work in primates has suggested that only corticospinal axons originating in caudal primary motor cortex ("new M1") and area 3a make monosynaptic cortico-motoneuronal connections with limb motoneurons. By contrast, the more rostral "old M1" is proposed to control motoneurons disynaptically via spinal interneurons. In six macaque monkeys, we examined the effects fro...

INTRODUCTION IN THIS STUDY WE COMPARED TRANSCRANIAL MAGNETIC STIMULATION (TMS) ELICITED MOTOR EVOKED POTENTIALS (MEPS) IN A POSTURAL (BILATERAL LOW BACK EXTENSION: BLBE) and a respiratory (forced expiration during breath holding: FEBH) task. METHODS Using TMS of the left motor cortex, simultaneous patterns of corticospinal facilitation of the contralateral erector spinae (ES) and rectus abdom...

Ipsilateral actions of pyramidal tract (PT) neurons are weak but may, if strengthened, compensate for deficient crossed PT actions following brain damage. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can strengthen ipsilateral PT (iPT) actions; in particular, those relayed by reticulospinal neurons co-excited by axon collaterals of fibre...

14 15 16 17 Section and Senior Editor: 18 Abbreviated title: Crossed Corticospinal Effects after SCI 19 Number of figures: 6 20 Number of tables: 3 21 Number of pages: 32 22 23