Orderly Recruitment of Muscle Action Potentials

1968/12/01 by Camille B. Olson · 7 citations
Engineering · Neuroscience · #Muscle activation and electromyography studies #Motor Control and Adaptation #Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Studies

paper · doi:10.1001/archneur.1968.00480060061008

Abstract

RECENT studies from this laboratory¹have shown that there is a functionally significant relationship between the size of individual motor neurons and their susceptibility to discharge by physiological stimuli. The smaller the cell, the more readily it is discharged by all normal stimuli. This sizeprinciple has been demonstrated in a variety of experiments in which discharge of motor neurons has been brought about by stimulation of the motor cortex, basal ganglia, cerebellum, or brainstem,²or by evoking stretch reflexes, flexor reflexes, or crossed reflexes.^1,3 The present study was begun after recordings of muscle action potentials in stretch reflexes revealed an orderly recruitment of units of increasing amplitude, which was strikingly similar to that seen in records from ventral root filaments. There have been several reports^4-7in which it was noted that the amplitude of individual electromyographic (EMG) potentials increased with the total amount of excitation.

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• Evidence for motor cortex dedifferentiation in older adults. [europepmc]
• Motor unit pool organization examined via spike-triggered averaging of the surface electromyogram. [europepmc]
• The time course of neuromuscular impairment during short-term disuse in young women. [europepmc]
• A prolonged hiatus in postmenopausal HRT, does not nullify the therapy's positive impact on ageing related sarcopenia. [europepmc]

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• The neural control of movement: a century of <i>in vivo</i> motor unit recordings is the legacy of Adrian and Bronk
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• Recruitment Patterns in Human Skeletal Muscle During Electrical Stimulation
• Innervation Zone and Propagation Velocity in Human Muscle.¹