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

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

The response to injury in the perihperal nervous system

Persisting neurones switch to a ‘survivor’ phenotype and the expression of hundreds of genes8,9 is changed to compensate for the loss or diminution of target-derived neurotrophic factors,10 and in order to regrow their axons across the site of the injury and back into the periphery. Proximal changes, such as synaptic reorganisation in the cortex11–13 and spinal cord, occur upstream of axotomised first-order motor and sensory neurones, and may influence the functional outcome months or even years later.14–16 Distal to the injury, a series of molecular and cellular events, some simultaneous, others consecutive, and collectively called Wallerian degeneration, is triggered throughout the distal nerve stump and within a small reactive zone at the tip of the proximal stump (Fig. 2Go).17–19

http://web.jbjs.org.uk/cgi/content/full/87-B/10/1309