Fusimotor activity and the tendon jerk in the anaesthetised cat

This is a study of the tendon jerk reflex elicited by a brief stretch applied to the triceps surae muscle group in the chloralose-anaesthetised cat. The size of the recorded reflex depended on stretch parameters (optimum at 300 microns amplitude at a rate of 100 mm/s) and on how the muscle had been conditioned. A reflex elicited after a conditioning contraction at the test length was often twice as large as after a contraction carried out at a length longer than the test length. This difference was attributed to the amount of slack introduced in the intrafusal fibres of muscle spindles by conditioning. The question was posed, did ongoing fusimotor activity exert any influence on the size of the tendon jerk? Depolarization indices (DPI) were calculated from responses of muscle spindles to stretch and correlated with the level of reflex tension. Values of DPI obtained from afferent responses with and without repetitive stimulation of identified fusimotor fibres suggested that with the stretch parameters used here the main influence of fusimotor activity was that it removed any pre-existing slack in muscle spindles and thereby increased reflex tension. In the absence of intrafusal slack, stimulation of static and dynamic fusimotor fibres had little additional influence on the size of the reflex. It is concluded that much of the variability typically seen with tendon jerks is due to muscle history effects. Since in muscles which have not been deliberately conditioned there is commonly some slack present in spindles, activity in fusimotor fibres is likely to reduce slack and therefore increase reflex size.