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Abstract
Hairless skin acts as a heat exchanger between body and environment, and thus greatly contributes to body temperature regulation by changing blood flow to the skin (cutaneous) vascular bed during physiological responses such as cold- or warm-defense and fever. Cutaneous blood flow is also affected by alerting state; we ‘go pale with fright’. The rabbit ear pinna and the rat tail have hairless skin, and thus provide animal models for investigating central pathway regulating blood flow to cutaneous vascular beds. Cutaneous blood flow is controlled by the centrally regulated sympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic premotor neurons in the medullary raphé in the lower brain stem are labeled at early stage after injection of trans-synaptic viral tracer into skin wall of the rat tail. Inactivation of these neurons abolishes cutaneous vasomotor changes evoked as part of thermoregulatory, febrile or psychological responses, indicating that the medullary raphé is a common final pathway to cutaneous sympathetic outflow, receiving neural inputs from upstream nuclei such as the preoptic area, hypothalamic nuclei and the midbrain. Summarizing evidences from rats and rabbits studies in the last 2 decades, we will review our current understanding of the central pathways mediating cutaneous vasomotor control.
Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest
No potential conflicts of interest are disclosed.
Funding
Our series of studies was supported by Australian Research Council, Japan Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, High Blood Pressure Research Council of Australia, National Health and Medical Research Council, and Flinders Medical Center Foundation.
About the Authors
Dr Youichirou Ootsuka (Yoichiro Otsuka), also known as YoYo Ootsuka, completed his Bachelor of Biology in 1992, his Master of Medical Science in 1994, and then his PhD in Physiology in 1998 at the Department of Physiology, University of Tsukuba, Japan. During his academic appointment as an assistant lecturer at Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Tsukuba, he was invited to Howard Florey Institute of Experimental and Medicine, as an International Hypertension Society Research Fellow in 2000, and then to the Neurology Laboratory of Flinders University in 2002. In 2009, he was appointed Associate Professor for Department of Physiology, Kagoshima University, Japan. In 2013, he returned to Flinders University as the Mary Overton Neuroscience Research Fellow. He promotes understanding of the brain mechanisms controlling autonomic functions.
Dr Mutsumi Tanaka completed her Bachelor of Health Science in 1998, her Master of Medical Science in 2000 and then her PhD in Physiology in 2003 at Osaka University, Japan. After she undertook her PhD, she joined the Systems Neurobiology group at Florey Neuroscience Institutes as a post-doctoral research officer. She then returned to Japan to take a research position at Health Effect Research Group in Japan Automobile Research Institute in 2013. She is engaged in investigating effects of air pollutants including automobile exhaust, to human health including respiratory and cardiovascular systems.
