Sprouting of peripheral nerve axons in the spinal cord of monkeys

It has been previously suggested that two conditions must be met in order for sprouting to occur in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord: afferent fibers must be stimulated to grow and alternate synaptic sites must be made available. We show that reversibly deactivating peripheral nerve axons by nerve crush alone, which produces little or no additional available synaptic sites, results in expansion of the peripheral nerve inputs in the spinal cord in both adult and infant macaque monkeys.