RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Stable Cortical Body Maps Before and After Arm Amputation
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2023.12.13.571314
DO 10.1101/2023.12.13.571314
A1 Schone, Hunter R.
A1 Maimon Mor, Roni O.
A1 Kollamkulam, Mathew
A1 Gerrand, Craig
A1 Woollard, Alexander
A1 Kang, Norbert V.
A1 Baker, Chris I.
A1 Makin, Tamar R.
YR 2023
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2023/12/14/2023.12.13.571314.abstract
AB Neuroscientists have long debated the adult brain’s capacity to reorganize itself in response to injury. A driving model for studying plasticity has been limb amputation. For decades, it was believed that amputation triggers large-scale reorganization of cortical body resources. However, these studies have relied on cross-sectional observations post-amputation, without directly tracking neural changes. Here, we longitudinally followed adult patients with planned arm amputations and measured hand and face representations, before and after amputation. By interrogating the representational structure elicited from movements of the hand (pre-amputation) and phantom hand (post-amputation), we demonstrate that hand representation is unaltered. Further, we observed no evidence for lower face (lip) reorganization into the deprived hand region. Collectively, our findings provide direct and decisive evidence that amputation does not trigger large-scale cortical reorganization.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.