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上部运动神经元

Matthew Barry Jensen 创建

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in this video I'm gonna talk about upper motor neurons so upper motor neurons which are different than the motor neurons we talked about before which are the lower motor neurons now when we talked about the lower motor neurons we talked about how they have their somas either in the brainstem or in the spinal cord and how they send axons out through nerves in the peripheral nervous system to synapse on and control skeletal muscle cells to tell those skeletal muscle cells when to contract and we talked about that the lower motor neurons that passed through spinal nerves primarily control muscles of the limbs and the trunk and lower motor neurons that pass through cranial nerves primarily control the skeletal muscles of the head and the neck but now we're gonna talk about the upper motor neurons because it turns out that while the lower motor neurons are controlling the skeletal muscle cells and telling them when to contract upper motor neurons are the ones that are controlling the lower motor neurons and controlling their activity the somos of the upper motor neurons are found mainly up in the cerebral cortex way up here in the brain on that outside surface of the cerebrum and their axons to send down to synapse on lower motor neurons in the brain stem or in the spinal cord and so information flows from up here mainly in the cerebral cortex down these axons to the lower motor neuron somas and then out the axons of the lower motor neurons to actually reach the skeletal muscle cells to determine when they'll contract and we can divide up the upper motor neurons into some different pathways or tracks depending on if they go all the way down into the spinal cord to synapse on lower motor neurons or if they go a shorter distance to the brain stem to synapse on lower motor neurons so first let's look at these longer upper motor neurons that send axons all the way down into the spinal cord so let's take the brain in the spinal cord here and I've got a little larger illustration of that so here we have the cerebrum up top here's the brainstem and behind it as this air and then beneath it is the spinal cord first let's think about a lower motor neuron here in a higher part of the spinal cord on the left side because we're looking at the front here so this would be the left side and the lower motor neuron I'll have its soma inside the spinal cord and then it'll send its axon out through spinal nerves and the smaller branches that are branches into until its synapses in some muscle that it's going to control some of the skeletal muscle cells in that muscle the upper motor neuron that's going to control this lower motor neuron is going to start somewhere way up in the cerebral cortex here in that layer of gray matter on the outside of the cerebrum and it's axons going to kind of travel down to the deep white matter of the cerebrum and then it's going to travel down through the brainstem through the midbrain then the pons then the medulla and then at this point where the brainstem meets the spinal cord at the bottom of the medulla most of these axons are going to cross over to the other side and then they're gonna travel down the other side of the spinal cord until they reach this lower motor neuron to synapse on it and control it so this pathway this collection of axons that our upper motor neurons traveling from the cerebral cortex to lower motor neurons in the spinal cord we call this the corticospinal tract let me write that out Korda KO cord KO which means it starts in the cerebral cortex and then spinal which means that it ends in the spinal cord so it's going from court cerebral cortex to spinal cords we call the corticospinal tract and attract is a collection of axons traveling together through the central nervous system now because most of the axons that make up the cortical spinal tract travel down one side of the brain and then cross over to travel down the other side of the body what we see is that if there's dysfunction of these axons of the cortical spinal tract on one side of the spinal cord we usually get weakness of muscles on that same side but if we see dysfunction of the cortical spinal tract on the other side of the brain either up here in the cerebral hemisphere on this side or on the brainstem on this side we usually see weakness on the other side of the body so that the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body in terms of controlling the skeletal muscles for the most part things get a little more complicated for the lower motor neurons in the brain stem so let me just draw one lower motor neuron over here on the left side and it's gonna send an axon through a cranial nerve to a skeletal muscle in the head or the neck and let me actually draw it the same kind of thing on the other side sending the lower motor neuron axons through the same cranial nerve to the other side to a muscle on the other side of the head or the neck there are gonna be different upper motor neuron somas up here in the cerebral cortex and many of these are gonna send an axon down in a similar way as the corticospinal tract and similarly they're gonna cross over and innervate these lower motor neurons on the other side of the brainstem however for lots of these lower motor neurons that pass through cranial nerves what we actually see is that there's often also upper motor neuron axons that come down and innervate lower motor neurons on the same side so instead of having most of the upper motor neuron axons cross from one side over the other side like we see with the cortical spinal tract for a lot of these lower motor neurons that control muscles of the head and neck we see that one side of the cerebral cortex often sends upper motor neurons to both sides of the brainstem so we give this tract carrying the upper motor neuron axons to lower motor neurons in the brainstem a different name than the cortical spinal tract because we're not going to the spinal cord we're still starting at the cerebral cortex so we call this pathway it starts with Kordich oh l chord at Ko but instead of going to the spinal cord we're going to the brainstem and it would make sense to call this the cord brain stem tract but instead it's got an older name for the brain stem which was the bulb so we call it the cortical bulb our tract cortical bulb are tracked and that includes these upper motor neuron axons that are going to innervate lower motor neurons in the brain stem and because the wiring is a little bit more complicated in the brain stem we can get some different patterns of weakness with abnormalities of this pathway so I'll save some of the details of that for later because it gets a little complicated dysfunction of either the lower motor neurons or the upper motor neurons can cause weakness because if there's a problem with the lower motor neurons and they're not telling the skeletal muscle cells to contract then there isn't going to be as much contraction and we can see weakness but it turns out that if there's a problem with the upper motor neurons and they're not telling the lower motor neurons to tell the skeletal muscle cells to contract we also don't get as much contraction and we can see weakness in another video we talked about the lower motor neuron signs these other things we can see in addition to weakness or even without weakness if there's some problem with the lower motor neurons and it turns out there are upper motor neuron signs and just like with the lower motor neuron signs the upper motor neuron signs can occur with weakness or even without weakness if there's abnormalities of these upper motor neurons and this can help us understand if a patient has weakness whether the problem is in the lower motor neurons or in the upper motor neurons the first of these upper motor neuron signs we call hyperreflexia let me just write that out hyper reflects aeon and this is an increase in the muscle stretch reflexes so let me just write em sr4 muscle stretch reflexes so this is actually the opposite of one of the lower motor neuron signs which is hyporeflexia where we see a decrease in the muscle stretch reflexes so that if this patient over here had some trouble with their cortical spinal tract their upper motor neurons coming down from the cerebral cortex to the lower motor neurons in the spinal cord when this doctor right here taps this patient in the ten below-the-knee camp with a little rubber hammer instead of less response instead of less contraction of these muscles we could see more response we could see this very brisk kicking out of the leg because these muscles can over respond to that stimulus the cause of hyperreflexia with upper motor neuron dysfunction is not totally clear but apparently when the muscle spindles these little receptors in skeletal muscle that detect muscle stretch when they're activated in the somatosensory neurons carry that information back into the spinal cord to excite the lower motor neurons to cause the muscle contraction that is the muscle stretch reflex apparently without periodic stimulation of the lower motor neurons from the upper motor neurons the lower motor neurons may become kind of super-sensitive so that the normal excitation of this somatosensory neuron causes this very exaggerated response of the lower motor neuron and you get a bigger reflex but we definitely don't understand the whole process of why this happens the next upper motor neuron sign is called clonise Colonus and clonise involves rhythmic contraction rhythmic contraction of antagonist muscles and tagging Estelle's and those are muscles that have the opposite effect on a joint so for example on this patient here and on you there are muscles in the front of the shin that cause you to pull your toe up like that pull your foot up and there are muscles in the back part of the leg here that causes you to push your foot down like you're pushing on a gas pedal we call those antagonist muscles cuz they have it they cause the opposite movement and what we see with upper motor neuron dysfunction is that if this doctor were to grab this patient's foot and rapidly pull it upward the foot may go into this involuntary movement where it starts coming up and down and up and down and up and down and we call that clonus and the cause of clonus is probably just hyperreflexia because if the doctor here rapidly pulls up on the foot there's stretching of these muscles in the back of the leg here and that can activate the muscle stretch reflex causing these muscles to contract which then makes the foot go down and that can actually stretch the muscles on the front of the leg here triggering their muscle stretch reflex and then the foot comes up and basically each time the foot goes the other direction it stretches the muscles on the other side so that the muscle stretch reflexes of the antagonist muscles are triggering each other the next upper motor neuron sign that we call hypertonia hypertonia and hypertonia means increased tone of skeletal muscles and this is another one that's an opposite of one of the lower motor neuron signs where we can see hypotonia we can see decreased tone of skeletal muscles and we really don't understand why we see an increased tone of skeletal muscles when there's upper motor neuron dysfunction one possibility is that it's related to the hyperreflexia that if this doctor takes this patient's leg and tells them to try to relax it as best they can and they start moving that leg around it gives more resistance it isn't as relaxed as it normally would be that might be because the pulling on the muscles stretches them and activates the muscle stretch reflex well we're not totally sure about this and the last upper motor neuron sign has a long name it's called the extensor extensor plantar it's just refers to the foot at the bottom of the foot stents ER plantar response and what this long name means is that if you take a hard object like they're showing in this picture here and what we usually use is the hard end of a reflex hammer and what you do is you scrape up along the bottom of the foot with a hard end not really hard but just enough so that a person can feel it and the normal plantar response is not extensors its flexor so just like they've drawn here if you normally scrape something hard up along the bottom of the foot the toes all flex they come down in the direction of the bottom the foot like they're showing here this way but with upper motor neuron dysfunction we can see this abnormal extensor plantar response where we scrape up along the bottom of the foot and then the toes go into extension they go to the other direction away from the bottom of the foot so we call that the extensor plantar response it also has a person's name bubinski so it's called the Babinski sign because this person described this and we really don't know the mechanism of the extensor plantar response when there's dysfunction of the upper motor neurons but it is something that we commonly see