[CCoE Notice] Seminar: Origins of Muscular Weakness in Hemispheric Stroke: Applications of Advanced Technologies

[Grayson, Audrey A]

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Seminar
Origins of Muscular Weakness in Hemispheric Stroke: Applications of Advanced Technologies
Friday, April 1, 2016
SEC 204: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. W. Zev Rymer

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William Zev Rymer, MD, PhD
Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago
Northwestern University

Abstract: Muscular weakness in hemispheric stroke is a major clinical problem, often giving rise to severe motor impairment in contralesional limbs, and to continuing disability.

One widely accepted factor causing such weakness is the stroke-related interruption of corticospinal connections innervating relevant spinal motor networks. But that is not the only potential source of motor impairment. There are also disruptions in motor unit recruitment profiles and in motor unit firing rates mediated by spinal cord circuits, and there is also a progressive change in skeletal muscle structure and function.

The emergence of new motor unit recording techniques, single motor unit discrimination methods, and in the electrical and mechanical analyses of muscle properties, is helping us to probe these complex issues.

It appears that disruptions in motor unit regulation, together with changes in muscle architecture and mechanical properties, all make major contributions to clinical muscle weakness. These disruptions in muscle structure and in neural control will be reviewed, and their relative contributions to voluntary weakness will be analyzed and discussed.

Bio: W. Zev Rymer, MD PhD is currently researching regulation of movement in normal and neurologically disordered human subjects including sources of altered motoneuronal behavior in hemispheric stroke survivors, using electro-physiological, pharmacological, and biomechanical techniques.

Dr. Rymer serves as Director of the Sensory Motor Performance Program, a position he has held since 1987, and Director of Research Planning at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC). In addition to his research roles at RIC, Dr. Rymer holds appointments as Professor of Physiology and Biomedical Engineering at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. His laboratory receives support from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), and a number of research-oriented foundations.

Dr. Rymer earned his medical degree from Melbourne University and his PhD in Neurophysiology from Monash University, both in Australia. After postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University Medical School, he became an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery and Physiology at the State University of New York, Syracuse. In 1978, he came to Chicago as an Assistant Professor of Physiology at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, and he remained as a primary faculty member in Physiology until his appointment at the RIC.

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