Monitoring somatosensory evoked potentials in spinal cord ischemia-reperfusion injury

Currently intraoperative monitoring using somatosensory evoked potentials has been widely recognized to prevent iatrogenic spinal cord injury. Previous studies only reported the monitoring effects of somatosensory evoked potentials after mechanical factors-caused spinal cord injury. However, spinal cord injury is not only triggered by mechanical factors, biochemical factors and vascular factors may cause spinal cord ischemia-reperfusion injury. It remains unclear whether spinal cord ischemia-reperfusion injury caused by ischemia and other non-mechanical factors can be monitored by somatosensory evoked potentials.

A recent study by Jun Zou and colleagues from the First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University in China showed that changes in somatosensory evoked potential latency can reflect the degree of spinal cord ischemic injury, while the amplitude variations are indicators of the late spinal cord reperfusion injury, which provide evidence for the assessment of limb motor function and avoid iatrogenic spinal cord injury. These findings were published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 33, 2013).