Afferent sympathetic nerve fibres with aortic endings

1. We recorded the electrical impulse activity of thirty-five single afferent fibres with aortic endings isolated from the third to the sixth left thoracic sympathetic rami communicantes of anaesthetized cats. The endings of each fibre were localized by mechanical probing of the opened aorta at the end of each experiment. 2. Twenty-four fibres had a single aortic receptive field. Eleven fibres had several and distinct receptive fields (from two to four): they were usually located in nearby aortic areas or, in addition, in other proximal portions of the arterial tree or in the adjacent pleura and connective tissue. 3. Twenty-nine fibres had conduction velocities ranging between 5 and 27 m/sec (Group Adelta), while six fibres had conduction velocities between 0-2 and 1-2m/sec (Group C). 4. The spontaneous impulse activity was in phase with the aortic pressure pulse and consisted of not more than one impulse per pressure pulse. It was increased during increases in aortic pressure and, conversely, decreased during decreases in aortic pressure. In vivo and post mortem studies showed that these mechanoreceptors had an impulse activity which rapidly adapted during sustained stimuli. They thus seem to signal pulsatile aortic stretch. 5. These aortic sympathetic afferents are likely to be part of a nervous pathway through which pressor reflexes, exhibiting positive feed-back characteristics, can elicited.