Tonic vibration reflex is a sustained contraction of a
muscle
Skeletal muscles (commonly referred to as muscles) are organs of the vertebrate muscular system and typically are attached by tendons to bones of a skeleton. The muscle cells of skeletal muscles are much longer than in the other types of muscl ...
subjected to vibration. This reflex is caused by vibratory activation of
muscle spindles
Muscle spindles are stretch receptors within the body of a skeletal muscle that primarily detect changes in the length of the muscle. They convey length information to the central nervous system via afferent nerve fibers. This information can be ...
— muscle receptors sensitive to stretch.
Tonic vibration reflex is evoked by placing a
vibrator — which in this case is typically an electrical motor with an eccentric load on its shaft — on a muscle's tendon. 30–100
Hz vibration activates receptors of the skin, tendons and, most importantly, muscle spindles. Muscle spindle discharges are sent to the spinal cord through
afferent nerve fiber
Afferent nerve fibers are the axons (nerve fibers) carried by a sensory nerve that relay sensory information from sensory receptors to regions of the brain. Afferent projections ''arrive'' at a particular brain region. Efferent nerve fibers a ...
s, where they activate polysynaptic
reflex
In biology, a reflex, or reflex action, is an involuntary, unplanned sequence or action and nearly instantaneous response to a stimulus.
Reflexes are found with varying levels of complexity in organisms with a nervous system. A reflex occurs ...
arcs, causing the muscle to contract.
The effects of sustained vibratory stimulation on muscle contraction,
posture
Posture or posturing may refer to:
Medicine
* Human position
** Abnormal posturing, in neurotrauma
** Spinal posture
** List of human positions
* Posturography Posturography is the technique used to quantify postural control in upright stance in ...
and kinesthetic
perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...
s are much more complex than merely contraction of the muscle being vibrated.
Russian scientists Victor Gurfinkel, Mikhail Lebedev, Andrew Polyakov and Yuri Levick used vibratory stimulation to study human posture control and spectral characteristics of electromyographic (EMG) activity.
See also
*
Tendon reflex
Tendon reflex (or T-reflex) may refer to:
*The stretch reflex or muscle stretch reflex (MSR), when the stretch is created by a blow upon a muscle tendon. This is the commonly used definition of the term. Albeit a misnomer, in this sense a common ...
*
H-reflex The H-reflex (or Hoffmann's reflex) is a reflectory reaction of muscles after electrical stimulation of sensory fibers (Ia afferents stemming from muscle spindles) in their innervating nerves (for example, those located behind the knee). The H-re ...
References
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* English Translation
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* English Translation
*{{cite journal , doi=10.1007/BF01052289 , last1=Lebedev , first1=M. A. , last2=Polyakov , first2=A. V. , title=Analysis of the interference electromyogram of the human soleus muscle under vibrational stimulation , journal=Neurophysiology , volume=23 , pages=47–54 , year=1991
Reflexes