Late responses as aids to diagnosis in peripheral neuropathy.

Abstract

Clinical signs and symptoms of peripheral nerve dysfunction can frequently be correlated with abnormalities of conduction in groups of large motor and sensory nerve fibres'-" particularly if results from populations of patients (for example mean motor nerve conduction velocity) are contrasted with data from large numbers of normal subjects. When using standard techniques to study individual patients, however, one often finds the values for maximal motor and sensory conduction velocity to be within the normal range in a number of patients who have obvious clinical features of polyneuropathy. In order to improve the diagnostic yield of electrophysiological studies in individual patients with various peripheral neuropathies, we have studied the efficacy of two easily elicitable late responses, the F-response, which can be recorded from almost any skeletal muscle, and the H-reflex, which can be easily recorded from the soleus muscle. These two simple, reproducible physiolcgical responses were studied to evaluate conduction along the course of the whole "final common pathway", from the motoneurone to the terminal axon, as well as (in the case of the H-reflex) to gain some information regarding

Sural Nerve Morphology in Asymptomatic Uremia

“…This, plus the observation that structural derangement of myelinated fibers usually precedes signs of clinical or electrophysiologic dysfunctions [16], ac counts for the results in our cases with chronic uremia. Moreover, we are aware that proximal nerve conduction studies [12,17], which were not done in our cases, have proved to be advantageous for screening uremic neurop athy.…”

“…Pathologic studies in the past included chronic uremia cases without clinical neuropathy [1,4,5], yet few data are available regarding acute uremia [4,5], Moreover, numerous electrophysiologic studies regarding subclinical neuropathy in uremia have been reported [ 11,12,15,17,18,21 ]. In this report, it is our aim to look into the sural nerve morphology of cases with acute and chronic uremia, who had no clinical or electrophysiologic evidence of neurop athy.…”

The H-reflex as an important indicator in kinesiology

“…Among them are the patient's gender [48], age [49,50], measurement position [25,51], muscle tension [52], body temperature [53] and the anthropometric parameters [11,54]. The highest changes in the H-reflex parameters were observed in patients over the age of 40 years.…”

Analysis of F -Wave Parameters in Normal Infants and Children

“…F-wave latencies, measured from the stimulus artifact to the beginning of the evoked potential (9) , vary by a few milli seconds from one stimulus to the next. Hence, we displayed 15 trials on a storage oscilloscope, automatically shifting successive sweeps vertically (a function provided by DANTEC F-wave analysis program).…”