REFLEX DYSTROPHY OF THE EXTREMITIES

Abstract

The proper nutrition of adult tissue is the result of a balance between anabolic, or constructive, metabolic activities and catabolic, or destructive, metabolic activities. Wear and tear are replaced by repair. Injury is followed by regeneration. The forces which accomplish such an equilibrium are incompletely understood. A study of patients, therefore, in whom this balance has been disturbed is of some interest, as it may throw light on the normal control of the nutrition of tissue. After mild trauma, usually a blunt injury affecting a wide surface or a low grade infection of traumatic or nontraumatic origin, partial injury to a nerve, frost-bite or a burn, there occurs occasionally a peculiar vasomotor and trophic disturbance which has been designated by a variety of names, depending on the outstanding symptom, such as acute atrophy of the bone,1traumatic angiospasm,2traumatic vasospasm,3chronic traumatic edema,4peripheral acute trophoneurosis,