Regrowing skin nerves can erase protective signals when opposing impulses collide
Axonal impulse interferenceIn aged skin, nerve growth may reduce protective signaling when impulses traveling in opposite directions cancel each other.
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Regenerating sensory terminals can reduce protective information through collisions between stimulus-evoked orthodromic impulses and spontaneous antidromic impulses within the same axon. Inflammatory sensitization raises spontaneous initiation, while neural expansion adds initiation sites, increasing collision-dependent erasure of protective signals. The relevant substrate is ongoing bidirectional impulse traffic, not fiber abundance or a learned neural state. Correcting inflammatory gain before expansion reduces collisions, but selectively suppressing antidromic traffic should make gain correction dispensable. Improved protective input should also improve challenge-evoked coordination when sensory input is limiting; independently defective autonomic fibers remain a separate requirement.
After neural expansion, simultaneous distal and proximal recordings will show increased terminal responses but fewer centrally arriving stimulus-locked spikes.
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Reversible direction-selective suppression of antidromic traffic will immediately restore protective signal transmission despite unchanged fiber density, inflammatory mediators and terminal sensitivity. Restoring the interfering traffic will abolish rescue. Failure to detect collision-timed missing spikes, or persistence of dysfunction after verified collision suppression, rejects this explanation in favor of downstream coordination or target-competence limitations.
Correcting nerve signal timing can restore skin protection without adding nerve fibers predicts instead: At matched fiber density, total spike count, mean inflammatory activity and isolated effector capacity, experimentally compressing transmission-delay dispersion will restore protective latency and coordinated perfusion–sweating responses.
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Introducing timing jitter with the same delivered activity will abolish restoration. Proximal afferent spike transmission will remain intact, distinguishing this from impulse cancellation. Correctly timed direct stimulation will elicit normal gland output without days of conditioning, distinguishing it from target-competence loss.
Sweat glands need continuing nerve signals to retain their ability to respond predicts instead: Sites that recover protective sensation and perfusion but retain poor sweating will also show reduced secretion after direct muscarinic stimulation, despite correctly timed sudomotor impulses. Repeated physiological cholinergic conditioning will restore subsequent challenge-evoked secretion after acute agonist effects wash out, without increased fiber density or further inflammatory reduction. Immediate rescue by timing correction, with normal initial direct-agonist responsiveness, rejects this mechanism.