Abstract
BackgroundPrevious analysis of the behavioural effects of spinal cord injury has focussed on coordination in the sagittal plane of movement between joints, limb girdle pairs or thoracic and pelvic limb pairs. In this study we extend the functional analysis of the consequences of clinical thoracolumbar spinal cord injury in dogs to quantify the well-recognised deficits in lateral stability during locomotion. Dogs have a high centre of mass thereby facilitating recognition of lateral instability.ResultsWe confirm that errors in lateral positioning of the pelvic limb paws can be quantified and that there is a highly significant difference in variability of foot placement between normal and spinal cord injured dogs. In this study there was no detectable difference in lateral paw positioning variability between complete and incomplete injuries, but it appears that intergirdle limb coordination and appropriate lateral paw placement recover independently from one another.ConclusionAnalysis of lateral paw position in the dog provides an additional tier of analysis of outcome after spinal cord injury that will be of great value in interpreting the effects of putative therapeutic interventions.
Highlights
Previous analysis of the behavioural effects of spinal cord injury has focussed on coordination in the sagittal plane of movement between joints, limb girdle pairs or thoracic and pelvic limb pairs
Spinal cord injury (SCI) produces a loss of the ability to place the feet in the correct positions with respect to the body's centre of mass – i.e. the accuracy of placement in the lateral plane
We examined the possibility of a correlation between physical size and the width of support in the pelvic limbs, using the length of the tibia as a means of estimating the size of each dog
Summary
Previous analysis of the behavioural effects of spinal cord injury has focussed on coordination in the sagittal plane of movement between joints, limb girdle pairs or thoracic and pelvic limb pairs. Previous studies on recovery of pelvic limb function in spinal cord injured quadrupeds have focussed predominantly on assessing the extent to which generation of muscular activity in the pelvic limbs can produce appropriate movement and coordination of movement between pelvic and thoracic limbs in the sagittal plane [e.g. Spinal cord injury (SCI) produces a loss of the ability to place the feet in the correct positions with respect to the body's centre of mass – i.e. the accuracy of placement in the lateral plane. This loss is implicit in many reports on pelvic limb function in experimentallyspinalised animals.
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