Acute plasticity in the human somatosensory cortex... : NeuroReport (original) (raw)

Brain Imaging

Acute plasticity in the human somatosensory cortex following amputation

Borsook, David1,3,4,8,10; Becerra, Lino2,7; Fishman, Scott1,3,6; Edwards, Annabel1,2; Jennings, Candice L.5; Stojanovic, Milan1; Papinicolas, Lito1; Ramachandran, Vilayanur S.9; Gonzalez, R Gilberto2,7; Breiter, Hans2,6

1MGH Pain Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA

2MGH NMR Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA

3Departments of Anesthesiology and Critical Care, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA

4Departments of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA

5Departments of Orthopedic Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA

6Departments of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA

7Departments of Neuroradiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA

8Departments of Neural Plasticity Research Group, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA

9Department of Psychology, University of California, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA

10Corresponding Author and Address: David Borsook, Departments of Anesthesiology and Critical Care, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: We thank Jeanette Cohan for manuscript preparation. This work was supported in part by the Melvin Fisher Research Fund (D.B.) and the Freeman Fund for Pain Research, Department of Neurology, MGH (D.B.).

Received 8 January 1998; accepted 25 January 1998

Abstract

WE studied a patient after amputation of an arm and found that in less than 24 h stimuli applied on the ipsilateral face were referred in a precise, topographically organized, modality-specific manner to distinct points on the phantom. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) performed one month later showed that brush-evoked activity in the brain demonstrates objective signal changes which correlate with perceptual changes in the phantom hand. This finding in humans corresponds to the observations of immediate plasticity in cortical pathways described in animals, including primates. The results suggest that reorganization of sensory pathways occurs very soon after amputation in humans, potentially due to the unmasking of ordinarily silent inputs rather than sprouting of new axon terminals.