Phantom Illusions in Spinal Cord Lesions

Abstract

The transection of the spinal cord leads to a breakdown of communications from the periphery due to dysfunction and/or structural lesions of the afferent sensory pathways. As a consequence of this breakdown, two different phenomena are observed. The deaffer- entated parts of the body seem nonexistent, like an amputation illusion, or they are manifested as a phantom sensation as a part of the anosognostic phenomenon. Although phantom illusions following amputations have often been reported in the literature, there are only a few papers describing them in spinal cord lesions [1-4, 6, 8, 12]. The present study will analyze the frequency, patterns, position, and dynamics of phantom illusions and the phantom pain in spinal transection. We also investigated the significance of concomitant brain injuries. The factors responsible for the transection phantom will be discussed. This paper is based on a study by Avenarius and Gerstenbrand [1], in which phantom illusions of patients with transection of the spinal cord are described. Patients