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Primary afferent and propriospinal fibers in the rat dorsal and dorsolateral funiculi
Author(s) -
Chung Kyungsoon,
Langford Lauren A.,
Coggeshall Richard E.
Publication year - 1987
Publication title -
journal of comparative neurology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.855
H-Index - 209
eISSN - 1096-9861
pISSN - 0021-9967
DOI - 10.1002/cne.902630106
Subject(s) - spinal cord , afferent , lateral funiculus , biology , anatomy , dorsum , white matter , neuroscience , dorsolateral , axon , central nervous system , medicine , magnetic resonance imaging , cognition , radiology , prefrontal cortex
The purpose of this study is to determine the numbers of primary afferent and propriospinal fibers in the dorsal and dorsolateral funiculi of the rat. The reason for concentrating on these areas is that they contain large numbers of unmyelinated axons. Our data are axonal numbers from the S2 segment of spinal cord in animals that had unilateral dorsal rhizotomies or spinal cord isolations. The major conclusions are (1) that 23% of the primary afferent fibers in the dorsal funiculus are unmyelinated; (2) that there are approximately 12,500 unmyelinated primary afferent fibers in the dorsolateral funiculus, which is more than the number of primary afferent fibers in the dorsal funiculus and tract of Lissauer combined, and (3) that approximately 25% of the axons in the dorsal funiculus and 44% of the axons in the dorsolateral funiculus are propriospinal. These data modify and extend previous ideas of the organization of spinal white matter.