Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-22-2020

Description

Modest recovery of somatic function after incomplete spinal cord injury (SCI) has been widely demonstrated. Recently we have shown that spontaneous recovery of baroreflex regulation of sympathetic activity also occurs in rats. Dietary restriction in the form of every other day fasting (EODF) has been shown to have beneficial effects on the recovery of motor function after SCI in rats. The goal of this study was to determine if EODF augments the improvement of baroreflex regulation of sympathetic activity after chronic left thoracic (T8) surgical spinal hemisection. To determine this, we performed baroreflex tests on ad-lib fed or EODF rats 1 week or 7 weeks after left T8 spinal hemisection. One week after T8 left hemisection baroreflex testing revealed that gain of baroreflex responsiveness, as well as the ability to increase renal sympathetic nerve activity (RSNA) at low arterial pressure, was significantly impaired in the ad-lib fed but not the EODF rats compared with sham lesioned control rats. However, baroreflex tests performed 7 weeks after T8 left hemisection revealed the inability of both ad-lib and EODF rats to decrease RSNA at elevated arterial pressures. While there is evidence to suggest that EODF has beneficial effects on the recovery of motor function in rats, EODF did not significantly improve the recovery of baroreflex regulation of sympathetic activity.

Copyright Statement

© 2020 Zahner and Beaumont. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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