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The association between muscle architecture and muscle spindle abundance

Kissane, Roger W.P.; Charles, James P.; Banks, Robert W.; Bates, Karl T.

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Authors

Roger W.P. Kissane

James P. Charles

Karl T. Bates



Abstract

Across the human body, skeletal muscles have a broad range of biomechanical roles that employ complex proprioceptive control strategies to successfully execute a desired movement. This information is derived from peripherally located sensory apparatus, the muscle spindle and Golgi tendon organs. The abundance of these sensory organs, particularly muscle spindles, is known to differ considerably across individual muscles. Here we present a comprehensive data set of 119 muscles across the human body including architectural properties (muscle fibre length, mass, pennation angle and physiological cross-sectional area) and statistically test their relationships with absolute spindle number and relative spindle abundance (the residual value of the linear regression of the log-transformed spindle number and muscle mass). These data highlight a significant positive relationship between muscle spindle number and fibre length, emphasising the importance of fibre length as an input into the central nervous system. However, there appears to be no relationship between muscles architecturally optimised to function as displacement specialists and their provision of muscle spindles. Additionally, while there appears to be regional differences in muscle spindle abundance, independent of muscle mass and fibre length, our data provide no support for the hypothesis that muscle spindle abundance is related to anatomical specialisation.

Citation

Kissane, R. W., Charles, J. P., Banks, R. W., & Bates, K. T. (2023). The association between muscle architecture and muscle spindle abundance. Scientific Reports, 13, Article 2830. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-30044-w

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 15, 2023
Online Publication Date Feb 17, 2023
Publication Date 2023
Deposit Date Jul 6, 2023
Publicly Available Date Jul 7, 2023
Journal Scientific Reports
Publisher Nature Research
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 13
Article Number 2830
DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-30044-w

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.





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