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

Friday, January 23, 2009

Sympathetic vasodilatation in human limbs

Along these lines, recent observations in animals indicate that chronic sympathectomy eliminates endothelial NO synthase expression
in sympathectomised blood vessels (Aliev et al. 1996). This suggests that normal NO-mediated responses to local and circulating factors would be present
following acute sympathectomy with local anaesthetics or drugs injected into the brachial artery, but that these responses would be absent in the months and
years following surgical sympathectomy.

http://jp.physoc.org/cgi/content/full/526/3/471