hello anatomy friends this is dr alsup and welcome to station 15 where we are going to
talk through some of the vertebral structures that are common to almost all of the movable vertebrae
so this will not be the video where we're talking about how you can tell the difference between
between say the cervical or the thoracic these are more structures that you can see in all of these
so we're looking at a thoracic vertebrae here but that doesn't matter because these
structures can be found in the other ones as well and i always like to start with the body
of the vertebra it can differ in terms of kind of shape and size but they're always going to be the
most anteriorly placed structure we're looking at a superior view here so the body will always
be anteriorly placed and then we will have the the rest of the vertebrae which is referred to
as the vertebral arch and we'll talk about the specific parts of the vertebral arch in a moment
but the space in between the vertebral arch and the body is going to be the vertebral foramen
which allows for the transmission or it will protect that spinal cord
and some of its associated structures like the meninges so the parts of the vertebral
arch are going to be these small kind of foot like petals which are your pedicles
so these will be kind of that connection between the body and the rest of the vertebral arch this
flattened portion of the arch will be the lamine and that's exactly what they mean they are going
to be these flattened portions if you're doing a laminectomy to get to the spinal cord you would
cut through these areas to be able to reflect off the more posterior portions of the vertebrae and
then what else we're going to have you identify are processes and these processes are important in
terms of muscle attachments in the thoracic region specifically you'll also have ribs attaching here
so you'll have two lateral projections or processes and these are the transverse processes
and then the most posterior projection will be the spinous process and so those are the ones that if
you palpate down the middle of your back you are feeling these spinous processes all the way down
okay now moving into a lateral view here this is actually the lumbar vertebrae but again it doesn't
really matter which level we're at because all are going to have these and you'll have these
kind of notches between the body and some of these portions of these projections here you will have a
superior articular notch and an inferior articular notch and that superior articular notch will artic
will kind of meet up with the inferior articular notch of the vertebrae above and kind of the same
thing here and when we put those two together you are going to form these intervertebral foramina
that you can see running down the full length of the vertebral column you can see these right here
so these are just notches that are meeting up to form these intervertebral foramina and these are
particularly important in terms of allowing the exit of spinal nerves and so that will allow for
those peripheral nerves to be able to head to whatever target organ they are trying to reach
okay so those are the basic structures that you will see in almost all vertebral vertebrae
we will move on in terms of stations talking a little bit about curvatures
as well as how to tell the difference between those vertebrae please make sure
to reach out if you have any questions and thank you for your time and attention here