A New Orleans research specialist has demonstrated that the process by which one nerve cell "inhibits" another to allow coordinated action need not require a specialized nerve link between the two cells.
But, says Dr. AdeleJEdisen, nobody yet loiows exactly how one cell inhibits another.
The process of inhibition, she stresses, is jut as important as excitation in the regulation and coordination of all nervous system functioning—including the "simple" acts of movement such as walking up to the highest and most complex functions of the brain.
Dr. Edisen, a physiology research fellow at Louisiana State Universtiy School of Medicine, will report her findings next week at a scientific meeting in Atlantic Gty, N. J.
Discussing the importance of the inhibitory process, which she and others have termed a sort of "short circuiting" of the cell whose action is temporarily stopped, Dr. Edisen says: "Without this balanced regulation of activity on a cellular basis, all functions of the nervous system would be chaotic in form and useless in determining the organism's reaction to the environment and its regulation of internal bodily processes, essential to the maintenance of life."
Her work at LSU is concerned with the simplest form of inhibitory phenomena in spinal chord reflexes. (Such reflexes, in a human, would include the patellar or "knee jerk" reflex.)
Dr. Edisen, working with cats, has demonstrated anatomically, as well as physiologically, that the connection between an inhibitory cell and a cell to be inhibited can be a direct connection, needing no linkage \>y an intermediate cell. "Furthermore," she r e p o r t s, "the region of the cell where such a connection is made appears to be specific. This may greatly aid in the search for the actual mechanism of the inhibitory process."
Dr. Edisen, the mother of three, holds a National Institutes of Health fellowship for the research.
