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

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Fear conditioning dependent on autonomic awareness

The degree to which perceptual awareness of threat stimuli and bodily states of arousal modulates neural activity associated with fear conditioning is unknown. We used functional magnetic neuroimaging (fMRI) to study healthy subjects and patients with peripheral autonomic denervation to examine how the expression of conditioning-related activity is modulated by stimulus awareness and autonomic arousal. In controls, enhanced amygdala activity was evident during conditioning to both "seen" (unmasked) and "unseen" (backward masked) stimuli, whereas insula activity was modulated by perceptual awareness of a threat stimulus. Absent peripheral autonomic arousal, in patients with autonomic denervation, was associated with decreased conditioning-related activity in insula and amygdala. The findings indicate that the expression of conditioning-related neural activity is modulated by both awareness and representations of bodily states of autonomic arousal.

Author/s: Critchley, Hugo D (HD); Mathias, Christopher J (CJ); Dolan, Raymond J (RJ);

Affiliation: Department of Imaging Neuroscience, 12 Queen Square, Institute of Neurology and Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL, WC1N 3BG, London, United Kingdom.

Journal: Neuron (Neuron), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2002-Feb; vol 33 (issue 4) : pp 653-63