PROMOTING RECOVERY OF AUTONOMIC FUNCTION AFTER SCI
While SCI patients view the regaining of autonomic functions as a high priority to improve their quality of life, promoting recovery of autonomic functions is a vastly understudied area of research. Furthermore, complications due to autonomic function disruption, such as cardiovascular disease and immune suppression, are leading causes of morbidity and mortality for chronically injured individuals.
We believe that one of the primary drivers of morbidity and mortality after a SCI is a dysregulated sympathetic nervous system. Neurons that modulate the sympathetic nervous system reside in the spinal cord. After a severe SCI, there is: 1) the loss of descending input onto sympathetic preganglionic neurons that regulate autonomic control; 2) maladaptive plasticity within the spinal sympathetic reflex circuit. These injury-induced changes, in toto, have been implicated in secondary complications of SCI, e.g. cardiovascular and immune dysfunction.
We are currently determining: 1) the mechanisms that drive this maladaptive plasticity of the spinal sympathetic reflex circuit; 2) if targeting these mechanisms post-SCI mitigates life-threatening, “secondary” complications of SCI.
