The amount of compensatory sweating depends on the patient, the damage that the white rami communicans incurs, and the amount of cell body reorganization in the spinal cord after surgery.
Other potential complications include inadequate resection of the ganglia, gustatory sweating, pneumothorax, cardiac dysfunction, post-operative pain, and finally Horner’s syndrome secondary to resection of the stellate ganglion.
www.ubcmj.com/pdf/ubcmj_2_1_2010_24-29.pdf

After severing the cervical sympathetic trunk, the cells of the cervical sympathetic ganglion undergo transneuronic degeneration
After severing the sympathetic trunk, the cells of its origin undergo complete disintegration within a year.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1439-0442.1967.tb00255.x/abstract

Saturday, January 19, 2008

ANS and emotional intensity

The Autonomic Nervous System:
Barometer of Emotional Intensity and Internal Conflict

A lecture given for Confer, 27th March, 2001
The material for this lecture is part of a six evening seminar ‘The New Anatomy: Exploring the Mind in the Body’ run at Chiron February-March 2001.

The Autonomic Nervous System has two branches, the Sympathetic and the Parasympathetic, which regulate the involuntary processes of the body, the viscera, and sense organs, glands and blood vessels. In evolutionary terms it is older than the CNS and its anatomical circuitry is broadly dispersed, creating a general response, quite unlike the highly specific pathways and response of the CNS. This generalised, widely distributed structure enables it to mediate overall changes in state; it is part of the limbic system which has also been known as the mammalian or emotional brain.

...– we now know that it is dynamically related to many other parts of the brain especially the orbitofrontal cortex. Autonomic also means self-regulating and this is a key principle of all body systems, which depend of constant feedback in order to maintain homeostasis. There are multiple feedback loops in the body which continually send and receive information about what’s going on and the ANS is part of this wider complex.