Abstract
THE concept of a two-neuron effector chain in the autonomic nervous system grew from the work of Langley and Dickinson1, who showed that nerve transmission in a sympathetic ganglion can be blocked with nicotine. The terms preganglionic and postganglionic were introduced2 to describe the nerve fibres conducting signals towards and away from the ganglion. Soon afterwards came the hypothesis that an additional neuron might be interposed3 between these two elements, but subsequent workers4,5 failed to detect these “interneurons”. Significance attaches to the interneuron hypothesis because an interneuron would make possible peripheral compensation in addition to the homeostatic neural mechanism (Fig. 1).
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References
Langley, J. N., and Dickinson, W. L., Proc. Roy. Soc., 46, 423 (1889).
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Lempinen, M., Acta Physiol. Scand., 62, suppl. 231, 1 (1964).
Grillo, M. A., Pharmacol. Rev., 18, 387 (1966).
Eränkö, O., and Härkönen, M., Acta Physiol. Scand., 63, 511 (1965).
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WILLIAMS, T. Electron Microscopic Evidence for an Autonomic Interneuron. Nature 214, 309–310 (1967). https://doi.org/10.1038/214309b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/214309b0
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