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 2, 2010

noradrenaline loss in the sympathetic nervous system of the heart

Symptoms or signs of abnormal autonomic nervous system function occur commonly in several neurological disorders.
Clinical evaluations have depended on physiological, pharmacological, and neurochemical approaches. Recently, imaging of sympathetic noradrenergic innervation has been introduced and applied especially in the heart. Most studies have used the radiolabeled sympathomimetic amine, (123)I-metaiodobenzylguanidine. Decreased uptake or increased "washout" of (123)I-metaiodobenzylguanidine-derived radioactivity is associated with worse prognosis or more severe disease in hypertension, congestive heart failure, arrhythmias, and diabetes mellitus. This pattern may reflect a high rate of postganglionic sympathetic nerve traffic to the heart. Many recent studies have agreed on the remarkable finding that all patients with Parkinson's disease and orthostatic hypotension have a loss of cardiac sympathetic innervation, whereas all patients with multiple system atrophy, often difficult to distinguish clinically from Parkinson's disease, have intact cardiac sympathetic innervation. Because Parkinson's disease entails a postganglionic sympathetic noradrenergic lesion, the disease appears to be not only a movement disorder, with dopamine loss in the nigrostriatal system of the brain, but also a dysautonomia, with noradrenaline loss in the sympathetic nervous system of the heart. As new ligands are developed, one may predict further discoveries of involvement of components of the autonomic nervous system in neurological diseases.
Semin Neurol. 2003 Dec;23(4):423-33.

Psychoneurological applications of endoscopic sympathetic blocks

In addition to more widely and longer known indications of ETS, various neurological disorders and psychologically stressful situations in their worst expressions might be alleviated by the reversible ESB procedure. The patients with social phobia, especially those who have also blushing and/or stage fright type of heart racing, benefit from the ESB. The disturbances of the sympathetic nervous system, e. g. in Parkinson's disease and multiple system atrophy might be alleviated with sympathetic block, especially the extrapyramidal symptoms in these diseases. In migraine, sympathetic surgery has been noted to give some help. The unilateral left-sided block has been effective in long QT-syndrome type arrhythmias. In schizophrenia, the phobic, paranoic or confusional reactions have been tentatively treated by the sympathetic block.
Clin Auton Res. 2003 Dec;13 Suppl 1:I20-1; discussion I21.
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