ABSTRACT
The wall of the gastrointestinal tract presents extensive plexuses of nerve fibres and neuronal cell bodies responsible for the modulation of the rhythmic gastrointestinal peristaltic activities, among other functions. One of the most developed ganglionated plexuses of the gastrointestinal tract is the Myenteric plexus located between the inner circular layer and outer longitudinal layer of the smooth muscle tunica. The musculature of fundus, body and pyloric parts of stomach are differently disposed and they perform different functions. Thus the present study was conducted to study the myenteric plexus of all parts of stomach by counting the number of collections of neurons, number of neurons in each collection, diameter and area of the neurons of the plexus. The stomach walls of 1 cm in size were taken from 5 cadavers of medical post mortem cases from Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Chandigarh and were processed for paraffin sections. 5 and 10 micro thick sections were stained with haematoxylin and Eosin and examined under light microscope. Randomly selected sections were photomicrographed using digital camera and morphometrical analysis was done using Image-Pro Express software. Number of collections of neurons was maximum in fundus with an average of 4.521 and each collection on an average contain 5.27 neurons ranging from 1-31, while body had 3.292 collections containing 1-19 neurons (mean: 3.198), pylorus had 3.883 collections of neurons which contained 1-16 neurons (mean: 4.411). The neurons were classified as small, medium and large according to the size of the area of their cell bodies. In this way, 11.3% neurons were found to be small, 69.5% medium and 19.1% large in fundus, 8.7% small, 80.6% medium and 11.2% large in body and 11.1% small, 74.3% medium and 14.5% large in pylorus.