UNLABELLED The minimum alveolar concentration (MAC) of a volatile anesthetic defines anesthetic potency in terms of a suppressed motor response to a noxious stimulus. Therefore, the MAC of an anesthetic might in part reflect depression of motor neuron excitability. In the present study we evaluated the effect of isoflurane (ISO) on neurons in the substantia gelatinosa driven synaptically by put...

Neuronal activity in the spinal cord results in extracellular potassium accumulation that is significantly higher in the dorsal horn than in the ventral horn. This is suggestive of differences in K(+) clearance, widely thought to involve diffusional K(+) uptake by astrocytes. We previously identified the inward rectifying K(+) channel Kir4.1 as the major K(+) conductance in spinal cord astrocyt...

treatment of spinal cord injury by exogenous cells has brought both successful and unsuccessful results. olfactory ensheathing cells and schwann cells have been widely used for transplantation purposes. in this study, we investigated the effects of these cells on contused spinal cord by introducing cells into subarachnoid space. fifty thousand schwann cells or olfactory ensheathing cells or a m...

objective: spinal cord injury (sci) causes inflammation, deformity and cell loss. it has been shown that melissa officinalis (mo), as herbal medicine, and dexamethasone (dex) are useful in the prevention of various neurological diseases. the present study evaluated combinational effects of dex and mo on spinal cord injury. materials and methods: thirty six adult male wistar rats were used in th...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Anesthesiologists are reluctant to consider higher levels for spinal anesthesia, largely due to direct threats to the spinal cord. The goal of this study is to investigate, with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the distances between the relevant structures of the spinal canal (spinal cord, thecal tissue, etc.) to determine modal anatomical positions for neuraxial anes...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Previous studies have failed to show significant correlations between the number and extent of T2 spinal cord lesions and the clinical status of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. We evaluated 1) whether it is feasible to create magnetization transfer-ratio (MTR) histograms of the cervical cord in patients with MS by using two different acquisition schemes, and 2) whether ...

The NG2-positive cells are the oligodendrocyte precursors, which, when terminally differentiated, are capable of myelinating the central nervous system. There is however an ever-growing list of evidences that NG2 cells actually possess an intrinsic neurogenic potential and they are capable of neuronal differentiation in response to environmental stimuli. To address the question, we have establi...