OBJECTIVE Sensory neuropathies often involve small-diameter myelinated and unmyelinated nerve fibers, and neurologic and electrophysiologic findings may be normal unless larger nerve fibers are involved. The small (intra)epidermal nerve fibers (ENFs) now can be visualized with immunohistochemical techniques using the panaxonal marker anti-protein gene product 9.5 (PGP 9.5). Using this technique...

PURPOSE Hemidecussation of fibers entering the optic chiasm from the optic nerves is well recognized. The reason why bitemporal hemianopia results from chiasmal compression has not been fully explained. There is still a paucity of data relating to the precise details of the routes that the nerve fibers take through the chiasm and, in particular, where and how nerve fibers cross each other. This...

Acupuncture has been used for analgesia, for treating visceral function disorders and for improving motor functions. It is well established that stimulation of the skin and muscles, either electrically or with noxious or non-noxious stimuli, induces a variety of somato-motor and autonomic responses. This strongly suggests that acupuncture acts by exciting cutaneous and/or muscular afferent nerv...

The innervation of the digestive tract, which is known to control a wide array of functions including smooth muscle contractility, splanchnic microcirculation, epithelial cell absorption/secretion and endocrine secretion, is composed of an intrinsic component consisting of neuronal cell bodies and nerve processes of the enteric neurons (i.e., the enteric nervous system) and an extrinsic compone...

The uterine tissue consists of unstriped muscle fibre and ganglia of the sympathetic system imbedded in it. The sacral roots and pelvic nerve do not enter into the composition of the uterine plexus. In the rabbit, irritation of the hypogastric nerve produces vasoconstriction and contraction of the uterus. In cats, stimulation of the hypogastric nerve produces at one time contraction and at othe...

Using an automated image analysis system, cross-sections from optic nerves of 17 normal cynomolgus monkeys were examined. The number of nerve fibers, their density, and the distribution of their diameters for whole nerves and for various regions of the nerve cross-section were estimated. The mean total number of fibers in the optic nerve was 1.2 million. The mean diameter of axons was 0.8 micro...

Aging is accompanied by deficits in cognitive function, which may be related to the vulnerability of myelinated nerve fibers to the normal process of aging. Loss of nerve fibers, together with age-related alterations in myelin sheath structure, may result in the inefficient and poorly coordinated conduction of neuronal signals. Until now, the ultrastructural analysis of cerebral white matter fi...

Noradrenergic (NA) nerve fiber density was investigated in the subepicardium and myocardium of ventricles in stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHRSP) and was compared with that of normotensive Wistar Kyoto (WKY) rats. Fluorescent NA nerve fibers in the subepicardium of the right and left ventricles of both strains at the ages of 10, 30, 60, 90, and 180 days were examined by the glyo...

The regional distribution of calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP)-immunoreactive nerve fibers in the epithelium throughout the nasal cavity was determined using semiserial cryostat sections and whole mount preparations. Both respiratory and olfactory epithelia displayed, in their basal portion, an extensive nerve plexus projecting beaded nerve fibers toward the luminal surface. However, the d...

Recent reports suggest a far greater plasticity in nerve tissue than previously believed. As the digestive tract is exposed to a variety of insults, this question is relevant to enteric nerves, but little is known about their ability to recover from damage. To address this problem, we ablated the myenteric plexus of the mouse colon with the detergent benzalkonium chloride (BAC) and followed the...