Limitations
paraplegia, CIVD
PARAPLEGIA
We did not monitor bladder stretching or urine production, which could have provided insightful information with regards to the unexplained fluctuations in skin temperature and blood flow of individuals with paraplegia. Also, it is important to note that we did not directly assess sympathetic vasomotor control in the fingers and toes of our participants. Instead, we assumed a lack of sympathetic outflow to the toes of our paraplegic participants and a normal such function in our able-bodied individuals. Future studies should address this gap and should aim to assess CIVD in a larger sample of people with paraplegia. In this regard, it is crucial to ensure that the recruited participants have experienced the spinal cord lesion for > 6 months, as this is known to affect vasomotor and sudomotor function below the level of the lesion. In our study, the time since injury ranged from 2 to 40 years. It would be interesting to explore potential links between the occurrence and characteristics of CIVD and the time since injury, yet our sample size did not allow such analyses. However, we should note that the participants in our paraplegic group that presented these fluctuations were the ones that were injured most recently (i.e., approximately the past two years).It could be argued that the analysis of the area under the curve of the CIVD responses would provide a more integrative result, of more practical relevance than that of a comparison of the individual characteristics of the CIVD response (Wickham et al. 