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parasympathetic nervous system
Sign in to saveAlso known as Parasympathetic nervous system, PNS
one of the three divisions of the autonomic nervous system, the others being the sympathetic nervous system and enteric nervous system.
Key facts
- Synonyms
- Parasympathetic autonomic nervous system
- Latin
- pars parasympathica divisionis autonomici systematis
- Acronym
- PSNS or PANS
- Mesh
- D010275
- Ta98
- A14.3.02.001
via Wikipedia infobox
Research
62,981 papers- Overview of the Anatomy, Physiology, and Pharmacology of the Autonomic Nervous System.Comprehensive Physiology · 2016
- Role of the parasympathetic nervous system in cancer initiation and progression.Clinical & translational oncology : official publication of the Federation of Spanish Oncology Societies and of the National Cancer Institute of Mexico · 2021
- Angiotensin II and the Cardiac Parasympathetic Nervous System in Hypertension.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021
- Leveraging parasympathetic nervous system activity to study risk for psychopathology: The special case of callous-unemotional traits.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2020
- Parasympathetic nervous system dysfunction in primary Sjögren's syndrome.Annals of the rheumatic diseases · 2003
via PubMed
Wikidata facts
- Part of
- autonomic nervous system
- Image
- 1503 Connections of the Parasympathetic Nervous System.jpg
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- Commons category
- Parasympathetic nervous system
- topic's main category
- Category:Parasympathetic nervous system
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Encyclopedic overview
The parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) is one of the three divisions of the autonomic nervous system, the others being the sympathetic nervous system and the enteric nervous system.
The autonomic nervous system is responsible for regulating the body's unconscious actions. The parasympathetic system is responsible for stimulation of "rest-and-digest" or "feed-and-breed" activities that occur when the body is at rest, especially after eating, including sexual arousal, salivation, lacrimation (tears), urination, digestion, and defecation. Its action is described as being complementary to that of the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for stimulating activities associated with the fight-or-flight response. In contrast to the sympathetic division, which predominates during acute stress responses, parasympathetic activity promotes energy conservation, metabolic storage (for example by enhancing glycogen synthesis), and the maintenance of internal homeostasis over longer time scales.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “parasympathetic nervous system” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.