Talk:Rheobase

I, Daniel Piening will continue to work on and develop this page through December as part of an on-going project for an Introduction to Neuroscience class at Boston College. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pieningd (talk • contribs) 15:15, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

Review

Great job on this article! I have a few minor changes in mind. First, most of the citations in your article appear before the period at the end of the sentence. The correct way to place the citations is right after the period concluding the sentence in which you cited a reference. Next, in the “Neurobiological Significance” section, you write: “The strength-duration time constant of both cutaneous and motor afferents decreases with age, and this corresponds to an increase in rheobase. Two possible reasons for this age-related decrease have been proposed.” I think you should instead say: “Two possible reasons for this age-related decrease in the strength-duration time constant…” because you mention both constants in the previous sentence and this change will clarify which constant you are talking about. Overall, great work! – Reedich (talk) 06:00, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the suggestions and mentioning the formatting issues for the citations. I have changed the citations and adjusted that sentence in the Neurobiological section. Pieningd (talk) 14:14, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Peer Review for BI481

This must have been a challenging page to create because of the complex characteristics of the topic but I think you have done a great job of explaining rheobase. Your introduction is very important to this page because it needs to identify what rheobase is, how it is defined, and its importance and I think you thoroughly elaborated on all of these points. I think one thing you could elaborate on is the difference between threshold potential and rheobase (the former being a specific potential and rheboase being involved in current). The first sentence can also include this information (the fact that it is a measure of membrane excitability based on current).

I found the Clinical Significance (by the way the title is spelled incorrectly) section to be very informative and interesting. However, some of the sections have no reference number. I think you should be liberal on your reference numbers as to be clearer as to where the information is from and to not violate any Wikipedia referencing rules.

I think “Experimental Findings” could be titled differently (“Biological Significance” or “Biological Functions”) and the subsection “Sensory nerves vs. motor nerves” is not really involved directly with “Experimental findings.” You also say (See Clinical Significance) at the end of the first paragraph but the hyperlink is dead (maybe because the title of that section is spelled incorrectly).

I think you can always go through the page and create more hyperlinks because information with such heavy and specific details always requires a lot of background knowledge and these hyperlinks help to clarify hard concepts. I also think capitalizing the section titles could make the page look more official.

Overall – the content of the page is very descriptive and informative but the formatting (titles, references) could be cleaned up. I enjoy the graph you have because it helps to grasp the concept of rheobase better. Plavadera (talk) 23:22, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

This article does a good job of covering a lot of information on a very general, somewhat ambiguous topic. I agree with the comments above, but will not elaborate for fear of being redundant. However I believe there needs to be a more basic understanding of how this topic applies to biological systems incorporated into the article and more consistency in tying the details of the article back to the topic of rheobase values.

It would be useful to include a section which simply outlines the different properties of a neuron which will impact the rheobase of the cell. While these are touched upon in the sensory nerves vs. motor nerves it might be useful to re-write this section focusing on the difference in cellular properties and then using the difference between sensory and motor nerves as an example of how these properties affecting rheobase manifest themselves in biological systems.

Similarly, many of the “Clinical Significance” (spelt wrong in article) subsections fail to tie the disease back to rheobase or explain how the neurons altered state affects this cellular property. Mannintg (talk) 04:26, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you both for your extremely insightful reviews and for recognizing the complexity of our topic! In reference to the difference between rheobase and threshold, in the first sentence we simply provided a very general description of rheobase, however, further down in the paragraph we touch on the difference between threshold potential and rheobase. We are sure to mention that rheobase is the minimal current amplitude of infinite duration that results in the depolarization threshold of the cell membranes being reached. We do agree with your comments on the title of the Experimental Significance section and have decided to change it to something more appropriate.

In reference to the different properties of a neuron which will impact the rheobase of the cell, when beginning our research, we had the same questions and searched for specific factors of neurons that affected the rheobase values, however, we soon discovered that there were not specific factors that contributed to the observed values. We found that although many of the published values for both rheobase and chronaxie for different tissues were quite variable, these variations were often due to methods used in obtaining the values (i.e. electrode properties, stimulus current wave form, stimulator output impedance and temperature) Geddes 2004.

We are also in the process of adding more hyperlinks to the page but are cautious not to add to many and distract from the actual article. We are also looking at different places where we can added citations if necessary.

Finally, in the process of researching this topic, we agreed that it was important to tie the different diseases in the clinical significance section back to rheobase specifically. However, we found that while many studies briefly discussed rheobase in reference to these different diseases, few went into great detail on how the neurons altered states specifically affected rheobase. Nevertheless, we still felt that it was important to include this information as it creates a broader understanding of the topic and its significance.

Again thank you very much for your reviews as it helped us to evaluate our information on rheobase! Pieningd (talk) 23:17, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Peer Review II

I felt that this article was very comprehensive and thorough in its explanation of the rheobase measurement. I was very impressed with the introduction. I especially liked that you chose to define your subject using its greek roots. I felt that you did a great job of linking topics in your article to other Wikipedia pages. This was beneficial to me, as the reader, because I was able to read further about some of the mathematical topics. The following are some suggestions for improvement:

• In the sentence: "In the past strength duration curves and rheobase determinations were used to assess nerve injury and today, plays a role in many diseases such as Diabetic neuropathy, CIDP, Machado-Joseph Disease, and ALS" I would change plays to 'they play' because I think that you are referring to the strength-duration curves and the determinations.
• I noticed that in some places throughout the article "strength duration" was hyphenated, and un-hyphenated in other spots. I would suggest making sure that it is hyphenated every time the duration curves are described in order to be consistent.
• In the sentence: "Use of these methods in toxic neuropathies have enabled researchers to designate protective factors for many peripheral nerve disorders, and several diseases of the central nervous system (see Clinical Significance)" I would change have to has because it refers to the use of the methods.
• The title for you Clinical significance section has a spelling error: Clinical significane.

Overall, I think that the article was very well done. Best of luck with your final edit! Czepielk (talk) 02:41, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you very much for pointing out these grammatical points! I agree with all of them and they have been changed. Pieningd (talk) 02:54, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Definition of rheobase

Mathematically, rheobase is equivalent to half the current that needs to be applied for the duration of chronaxie, which is a strength-duration time constant that corresponds to the duration of time that elicits a response when the nerve is stimulated at twice rheobasic strength.

Isn't this a circular definition? KenyaSong (talk) 07:41, 29 August 2019 (UTC)