A 69-year-old man with a complete spinal cord injury could not feel when his bladder was full. His abdomen told him anyway. Every day, as his bladder filled, his abdominal muscles began contracting on their own in a rhythmic pattern, and the movements stopped as soon as his bladder emptied.
The phenomenon, called abdominal clonus, is described in a case report in Cureus published Sept. 15. The report calls it a possible rare visceromotor manifestation, meaning a skeletal muscle response triggered by signals from an internal organ.
