Society for Neuroscience: Day 1

Twenty-fours travel (door to door) and setting up our exhibitors booth left just time to relax a little before the marathon Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting, San Diego began in earnest. In this day and age of heightened security and baggage scanning it was somewhat amazing that a suitcase containing a plastic and metal, anatomically-correct sized, model of a spinal cord got through without questions. Well actually, our over overweight suitcase, had been “physically inspected” a little leaflet inside revealed – so faith restored in the US Department of Homeland Security.

Speaking of security, we had been warned there was a demonstration against research on animals planned to coincide with the first day. If I hadn’t known about it I would have walked right by without noticing it which is different from scenes I’ve witness in the UK in the past. But it does inspire me to blog at a later date on the use of animals in research as it is an important issue.

The meeting proper kicked off today with the first afternoon of poster presentations. Spinal cord injury research was amongst those topics represented during this first session in a series of posters devoted to plasticity. Plasticity of the nervous system plays an important role in the way the nervous system adapts to experience and injury. The myriad of connections between neurons of the nervous system are not entirely fixed and can and do change in response to stimuli. Understanding plasticity and manipulating it may offer one of the most promising avenues of repair for many conditions including SCI.

So it was good to get an opportunity to visit Leanne Ramer’s poster that presented some work that may shed light on two serious consequences/complications of SCI, namely pain and autonomic dysreflexia. Pain needs no explanation, but autonomic dysreflexia (AD) probably does. The autonomic nervous system controls parts and functions of the body that we take for granted and we are largely not aware of, such as heart rate, bladder function blood pressure etc. When it goes wrong, as in (AD), the consequences can be serious. SCI not only affects movement and sensation but also the autonomic system but it was not clear how. SCI stimulates plasticity in autonomic nervous system leading to new (inappropriate) connections into parts of the nervous system that are involved in sensation. The upshot being signals being sent from organs such as the bladder start to stimulate the autonomic nervous system dealing with things like blood pressure; bladder becomes too full, blood pressure sky-rockets. Ramer showed that in addition to this the sensory parts change and become more active, exacerbating the problem.