Evidence for interneuronally mediated Ia excitatory effects to human quadriceps motoneurones.

Abstract

The possibility was investigated that interneuronal pathways contribute to Ia excitation of quadriceps motoneurones in normal man. Two techniques were used: (1) the indirect spatial facilitation technique for investigating summation of Ia excitatory effects in interneurones which may be interposed in pathways to quadriceps motoneurones; (2) the post-stimulus time histogram method for time course measurement of the firing probability of voluntarily activated motor units following femoral nerve stimulation. The spatial facilitation technique was applied while using the quadriceps H reflex to assess the excitability of the whole motoneurone pool: the comparison was made between the excitatory effects of two conditioning stimuli applied either separately or together. Summation of effects at a premotoneuronal level is suggested if facilitation of the reflex evoked on combined conditioning stimulation is larger than the algebraic sum of facilitations evoked by separate stimuli. The facilitation of the quadriceps H reflex evoked on combined stimulation was significantly larger than the algebraic sum of facilitations evoked by separate stimuli. In many experiments, although conditioning stimuli did not evoke any reflex facilitation when applied alone, a significant facilitation appeared on combined stimulation. At stimulus strengths near motor threshold, femoral nerve stimulation regularly evoked an early increase in firing probability of motor units with the same latency as the H reflex. A decrease in the stimulation strength resulted in the disappearance of this early peak and in the appearance of a second peak of increased firing probability, whose latency was about 5 ms longer than that of the early peak. It is argued that the second peak is caused by an interneuronally mediated Ia excitatory post-synaptic potential. It is argued that the interneuronally mediated Ia effects described in this paper do not significantly contribute to the unconditioned H reflex.