Stroke Training and Awareness Resources (STARs)


Cortical tracts and spinal reflexes

You need to know some neuroanatomy to understand how the brain and spinal reflexes affect the muscles. If you want to look at or revise the descending neural tracts from the brain to the spinal cord please see Additional Information for more details.

Here are the normal spinal reflexes and how a muscle contraction works. Imagine you strike the patella tendon at the knee with a tendon hammer.

Reflexes after stroke

Video transcript

Reflexes after stroke

M. So I’m just going to do a little test on the sole of your foot Allan. Just to tell us a little bit about the reflex activity in your muscles since you had your stroke and we can just do a comparison between the two sides. So I’m just going to run my thumb up the foot here. We can see that as I do that the toes just move down slightly. That’s called a flexor response or a negative Babinski. A big name that one. We can compare on this side if we come up this side and we see the toes move up in to extension and that’s called a positive Babinski. So it just tells us that the control of the reflex activity in this right side is affected.

A. Right

M. We can also just have a little look at the reflex activity in your tendon jerk. So if I just rest your left leg here on my hand. Just let your head relax, let everything go. If I just go here we can have a look at your tendon activity here. Just let it go. So very mild, that’s fine. Then we can make a comparison. Again nice and relaxed. We can see the difference between the reflexes of the two sides of your body. We can do this. Test these reflexes in different positions but it is quite helpful in this position.

Page last reviewed: 01 May 2020