Urinary Bladder Innervation within the Sacral Roots of a Sheep

Managing the urinary bladder after spinal cord injury is of primary importance because neurogenic dysfunction leads to life-threatening complications. Sacral Anterior Root Stimulators that control the bladder have been available for many years, however, these devices cannot sense the fullness of the bladder or detect the onset of reflex voiding. In order to address this fundamental limitation, this paper explores the possibility of recording the neural signals that encode bladder fullness from the sacral roots in sheep using extra-neural books. Stimulation of and recording from six roots (S1, S2 and S3 bilaterally) shows that efferent and afferent pathways seem to be co-located within roots, but also that simultaneous recording from multiple roots may be useful to enhance overall signal quality.