What is the structure of the spinal cord?

The human spinal cord can develop many diseases, such as poliomyelitis, syringomyelia, and spinocerebellar atrophy, etc. It can be said that diseases involving the spinal cord are very serious and will cause many symptoms in patients. Severe cases may even lead to shock and even endanger life safety. Therefore, the health of the spinal cord is very important. So what is the structure of the human spinal cord?

What is the spinal cord?

The spinal cord is mainly composed of nervous tissue; bones are mainly composed of connective tissue.

A cross-section of the spinal cord shows that it consists of gray matter in the center and white matter around it. Gray matter is composed of the cell bodies of neurons, and some low-level activity centers of human body activities are located in the gray matter; white matter is composed of nerve fibers and has a conduction function.

Bone tissue is a hard connective tissue also composed of cells, fibers and matrix. The fibers are gelatin fibers (same as collagen fibers), and the matrix contains a large amount of solid inorganic salts. Bones are basically similar to other connective tissues and are also composed of three components: cells, fibers and matrix. But the most significant feature of bone is that its cell matrix has a large amount of calcium salt deposits, making it a very hard tissue that constitutes the body's skeletal system. Bones are divided into compact bone and cancellous bone. Compact bone is composed of closely arranged bone plates, which are formed by parallel arranged gelatin fibers buried in a calcified matrix. They have uniform thickness. Between the two bone plates, there is a series of neatly arranged pits. The pits have bone cells with many protrusions, which are connected to each other by capillaries. The bone plates arranged on the bone surface are called outer ring bone plates, those arranged around the medullary cavity are called inner ring bone plates, and between the inner and outer ring bone plates there are many concentric circles arranged called Hasserian bone plates, the central tube of which is the Hasserian canal, which is parallel to the long axis of the bone and has branches connected to form a network, and blood vessels and nerves pass through the tube.

Connective tissue includes bone, cartilage, fibrous connective tissue, blood vessels, blood, nerve tissue, etc.

Nervous tissue is one of the basic tissues of humans and higher animals and is the main component of the nervous system. Nervous tissue is composed of neurons (nerve cells) and glia. Neurons are the main components of nervous tissue. They have the function of receiving stimulation and transmitting excitement. They are also the basic functional units of neural activity. Glia play a supporting, protective and nutritional role in neural tissue. The human nervous tissue is mainly composed of nerve cells. Nerve cells, also called neurons, consist of two parts: the cell body and the processes. Generally, each neuron has a long axon with few branches and several short dendrites with tree-like branches. The processes of neurons are also called nerve fibers. The tiny branches at the end of nerve fibers are called nerve endings, which are distributed to the tissues they control. Neurons can become excited when stimulated and can transmit the excitement along nerve fibers.