Relationship between the time course of the afterhyperpolarization and discharge variability in cat spinal motoneurones.

1. We elicited repetitive discharges in cat spinal motoneurones by injecting noisy current waveforms through a microelectrode to study the relationship between the time course of the motoneurone's afterhyperpolarization (AHP) and the variability in its spike discharge. Interspike interval histograms were used to estimate the interval death rate, which is a measure of the instantaneous probability of spike occurrence as a function of the time since the preceding spike. It had been previously proposed that the death rate can be used to estimate the AHP trajectory. We tested the accuracy of this estimate by comparing the AHP trajectory predicted from discharge statistics to the measured AHP trajectory of the motoneurone. 2. The discharge statistics of noise-driven cat motoneurones shared a number of features with those previously reported for voluntarily activated human motoneurones. At low discharge rates, the interspike interval histograms were often positively skewed with an exponential tail. The standard deviation of the interspike intervals increased with the mean interval, and the plots of standard deviation versus the mean interspike interval generally showed an upward bend, the onset of which was related to the motoneurone's AHP duration. 3. The AHP trajectories predicted from the interval death rates were generally smaller in amplitude (i.e. less hyperpolarized) than the measured AHP trajectories. This discrepancy may result from the fact that spike threshold varies during the interspike interval, so that the distance to threshold at a given time depends upon both the membrane trajectory and the spike threshold trajectory. Nonetheless, since the interval death rate is likely to reflect the instantaneous distance to threshold during the interspike interval, it provides a functionally relevant measure of fluctuations in motoneurone excitability during repetitive discharge.