[Location of somatic sensory neurons of the skin and dorsal nerve of the penis in rabbits].

OBJECTIVE: To trace the segmental distribution of somatic sensory neurons of the skin and dorsal nerve in the rabbits penis. METHODS: The experiment was performed on 8 adult male rabbits with the nerve tracing method of retrograde axonal transport of horseradish peroxidase (HRP), which was injected into the dermis around the penis and the dorsal nerve of the penis. The rabbits were sacrificed five days later to harvest the spinal cord segments and the dorsal root ganglia of lumbosacral segments for histological study. RESULTS: The HRP tracing showed that a number of labeled HRP positive neurons appeared in spinal ganglia (S2 - S4) in all the rabbits, and distributed segmentally. The counts of the positive neurons different segments were: S2 (215.0 +/- 10.2) , S3 (242.2 +/- 8.3) and S4 (109.7 +/- 8.4) respectively, with statistically significant difference between the two groups. CONCLUSION: The rabbit's sensory nerve fibers in both the skin and the dorsal nerve of the penis are rooted in the S2-S4 segments of spinal ganglia, which distribute regularly.