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. 2018 Feb 21;8:3443. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-21652-y

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Tubulation repair of the sciatic nerve gap ameliorates chronic flexion contracture of the paw. (A) Representative images of toe spread showing different stages of functional motor recovery of the foot. Rats were suspended by the tail and the number of toes showing visible abduction was counted when the rat was trying to escape and its toes maximally spread. At the denervation stage or in the case of no re-innervation, no signs of toe spread were observed (i). Partial (ii) and, in certain conditions, complete (iii) recovery of toe spread function were observed after successful muscle re-innervation. In some cases, the re-innervated foot showed flexion contracture of the toes (arrowhead) with or without toe loss (iv). Arrows indicate the injured foot. (B) Bar chart showing toe spread scores at 3 months post-injury. Despite that all nerve gap/repair groups showed incomplete recovery of toe spreading, the 3-mm conduit group exhibited significantly improved toe spread scores as compared to nerve autograft. (C) Severity of chronic flexion contracture at 6 months post-injury. The nerve autograft group showed severe flexion contracture; however, the nerve conduit groups showed significantly less severity in contracture. No contracture was observed after nerve crush injury. Data are expressed as mean±SEM (n = 10 rats each).