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Paralysis of respiratory muscles and hypoxic ventilatory chemoreflex
M Pokorski1, T Morikawa, S Takaishi
1Department of Physiology, School of Medicine, Chiba University, Japan.
Biomedica Biochimica Acta
|January 1, 1989
Abstract:
We investigated the hypothesis that if the chest and abdominal respiratory muscles are paralyzed, the stimulatory hypoxic ventilatory response (HVR) would be less. We compared the HVR in low cervical cord-transected tetraplegics and in normal subjects during unloaded and mechanically loaded breathing. The results demonstrated that the tetraplegics' HVR was unsuppressed, although they displayed a disturbance in load compensation. We conclude that the descending drive to respiratory muscle motoneurons is not germane for the proper operation of the hypoxic chemoreflex.