Abstract

After complete spinal cord injury, mammals, including mice, rats and cats, recover hindlimb locomotion with treadmill training. The premise is that sensory cues consistent with locomotion reorganize spinal sensorimotor circuits. Here, we show that hindlimb standing and locomotion recover after spinal transection in cats without task-specific training. Spinal-transected cats recovered full weight bearing standing and locomotion after five weeks of rhythmic manual stimulation of triceps surae muscles (non-specific training) and without any intervention. Moreover, cats modulated locomotor speed and performed split-belt locomotion six weeks after spinal transection, functions that were not trained or tested in the weeks prior. This indicates that spinal networks controlling standing and locomotion and their interactions with sensory feedback from the limbs remain largely intact after complete spinal cord injury. We conclude that standing and locomotor recovery is due to the return of neuronal excitability within spinal sensorimotor circuits that do not require task-specific activity-dependent plasticity.

Highlights

  • Transection of the spinal cord at thoracic levels completely and permanently abolishes communication between the brain and motoneurons located at lumbar levels that activate leg muscles

  • We compared the recovery of weight bearing during standing and hindlimb locomotion in spinaltransected cats that received non-task-specific training in the form of rhythmic manual stimulation of the triceps surae muscles (Group 1, Non-specific), locomotor training (Group 2, Locomotor-trained) and no training (Group 3, Untrained)

  • We showed that weight bearing during standing is a function that recovered without taskspecific training, and in all cats that we tested weekly after spinal transection, it recovered before hindlimb locomotion

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Summary

Introduction

Transection of the spinal cord at thoracic levels completely and permanently abolishes communication between the brain and motoneurons located at lumbar levels that activate leg muscles Despite this complete disruption, studies have shown that hindlimb locomotion recovers in various pre-clinical models, such as cats, rats and mice, with treadmill locomotor training (Shurrager and Dykman, 1951; Lovely et al, 1986; Barbeau and Rossignol, 1987; Lovely et al, 1990; Hodgson et al, 1994; Belanger et al, 1996; De Leon et al, 1998b; De Leon et al, 1999a; Leblond et al, 2003; Cha et al, 2007; Sławinska et al, 2012).

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