Bullinger KL, Nardelli P, Wang Q, Rich MM, Cope TC. Oxaliplatin neurotoxicity of sensory transduction in rat proprioceptors. J Neurophysiol 106: 704 -709, 2011. First published May 18, 2011 doi:10.1152/jn.00083.2011.-Neurotoxic effects of oxaliplatin chemotherapy, including proprioceptive impairments, are debilitating and dose limiting. Here, we sought to determine whether oxaliplatin interrupts normal proprioceptive feedback by impairing sensory transduction of muscle length and force by neurons that are not damaged by dying-back neuropathy. Oxaliplatin was administered over 4 wk to rats in doses that produced systemic changes, e.g., decreased platelets and stunted weight gain, but no significant abnormality in the terminal ends of primary muscle spindle sensory neurons. The absence of neuropathy enabled the determination of whether oxaliplatin caused functional deficits in sensory encoding without the confounding issue of axon death. Rats were anesthetized, and action potentials encoding muscle stretch and contraction were recorded intra-axonally from dorsal roots. In striking contrast with normal proprioceptors, those from oxaliplatin-treated rats typically failed to sustain firing during static muscle stretch. The ability of spindle afferents to sustain and centrally conduct trains of action potentials in response to rapidly repeated transient stimuli, i.e., vibration, demonstrated functional competence of the parent axons. These data provide the first evidence that oxaliplatin causes persistent and selective deficits in sensory transduction that are not due to axon degeneration. Our findings raise the possibility that even those axons that do not degenerate after oxaliplatin treatment may have functional deficits that worsen outcome. chemotherapy; neuropathy; muscle spindle; electrophysiology; afferent PERIPHERAL NEUROPATHY is the most common dose-limiting factor of oxaliplatin chemotherapy (for reviews, see Argyriou et al. 2008;Krishnan et al. 2005;Pasetto et al. 2006). Acute neurotoxicity, predominantly sensory in nature, is seen in nearly all patients and is characterized by cold intolerance, dysthesias, and, less commonly, laryngeal spasms (Wilson et al. 2002). With continued treatment, a cumulative sensory neuropathy can develop similar to that seen in patients treated with other platinum compounds. The onset of the neuropathy is gradual, and the severity worsens with an increase in cumulative dose. Chronic neuropathy is thought to primarily affect large-diameter sensory fibers (for evidence and earlier citations, see Jamieson et al. 2005), which include muscle afferents that provide the central nervous system with proprioceptive information. Consistent with this notion, patients often lose deep tendon reflexes, mediated by muscle spindle afferents, and develop proprioceptive loss seen as problems with coordinating movement, e.g., loss of dexterity and sensory ataxia.Sensory contributions to behavior and experience depend on conduction and central transmission of signals that are encoded by specialize...