If you’re looking at this slice of cord and are wondering which side is the anterior side and which is the dorsal, well that is why we are covering this topic today, so let’s get our frame of reference. You may even recall what we are covering today. If you’ve been following along, you know the grey matter, the white matter and you may remember a lot of the features that we’ve covered. Well, we’re here now so let’s go over it.Ībove you see a transverse slice of spinal cord. However, we never really touched on the landmarks we use when we talk about the spinal cord. Probably after the gross anatomy of the cord, which was similar to today. Had I planned this series better, I may have done this post closer to the beginning. Over the course of our series I did my best to help orient us by pointing out different features of the spinal cord, but we never really defined what those were explicitly and seperate from the other things we were covering. If I were to drop you off in the middle of some place familiar to you, you would be able to orient yourself and find your way to wherever it is you want to go. So today, we are going to take a detour and go over spinal cord features.Ĭhances are, if you’ve lived in one place for some time you know where you are in relation to the things around you. We never really talked about the landmarks of a spinal cord slice. Today we’re going to backtract (get it?) a little and go over something basic, but something we’ve skipped over to this point. For those of you who are just finding us, we have every one of these posts in our neuroanatomy category in reverse chronological order. Welcome to day thirty-three in our series. Once you’ve read this post, you should be able to identify the major parts and tell which side is the front of the cord. This cooling can prevent swelling and other processes that are thought to worsen spinal cord injuries.A human cervical spinal cord slice. One such treatment is to pump the body with cold saline to induce hypothermia. Researchers are also looking at ways to prevent the inflammation that worsens nerve damage after injury. Spinal cord injuries are notoriously difficult to treat because spinal nerves do not regenerate, although ongoing research suggests that stem cell transplants may be able to act as a bridge to reconnect severed nerves. For example, if the spinal cord is damaged at the level of the neck, it can cause paralysis from the neck down, whereas damage to the spinal column further down may limit paralysis to the legs. The extent of the paralysis depends on the location of the injury along the spinal cord and whether the spinal cord was completely severed. Because the spinal cord is the information superhighway connecting the brain with the body, damage to the spinal cord can lead to paralysis. In the United States, there around 10,000 spinal cord injuries each year. While a reflex may only require the involvement of one or two synapses, synapses with interneurons in the spinal column transmit information to the brain to convey what happened (the knee jerked, or the hand was hot). For example, the knee reflex that a doctor tests during a routine physical is controlled by a single synapse between a sensory neuron and a motor neuron. Reflexes are so fast because they involve local synaptic connections. These reflexes are quick, unconscious movements-like automatically removing a hand from a hot object. The spinal cord also controls motor reflexes. Axons and cell bodies in the ventral (facing the front of the animal) spinal cord primarily transmit signals controlling movement from the brain to the body.įigure 1. A cross-section of the spinal cord shows gray matter (containing cell bodies and interneurons) and white matter (containing axons). Axons and cell bodies in the dorsal (facing the back of the animal) spinal cord convey mostly sensory information from the body to the brain. Myelinated axons make up the “white matter” and neuron and glial cell bodies make up the “gray matter.” Gray matter is also composed of interneurons, which connect two neurons each located in different parts of the body. A cross-section of the spinal cord looks like a white oval containing a gray butterfly-shape, as illustrated in Figure 1. The spinal cord is contained within the bones of the vertebrate column but is able to communicate signals to and from the body through its connections with spinal nerves (part of the peripheral nervous system). The spinal cord is a thick bundle of nerve tissue that carries information about the body to the brain and from the brain to the body. Identify locations and basic function of the different parts of the spinal cordĬonnecting to the brainstem and extending down the body through the spinal column is the spinal cord.
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