As medical schools attempt to find time in their curriculum to cover more content, they have sought to develop new methods of teaching gross anatomy. The amount of time spent studying gross anatomy has declined amidst controversy as to how and when teaching is best delivered. Moreover, previous studies have established that medical student interest in surgery has declined, along with their technical skills in anatomy. This loss of interest is due to several factors, such as the male‐dominance present in the field, the difficulty of obtaining high enough grades, and nationality. For this reason, the Anatomy Department of the Universidad Central del Caribe School of Medicine at Puerto Rico (UCC) decided to create a pilot project aimed at second‐ and third‐year medical students with surgical interest, providing them with an integrated apprenticeship and an opportunity to mentor first‐year students during their Human Gross and Developmental Anatomy (HGDA) course. Their responsibilities include preparing for dissection, instructing students during dissection on weekends, and tutoring to emphasize anatomical concepts. This provides students with a variety of learning opportunities and a set of skills that we believe are necessary to pursue a career in the surgical field. To evaluate the viability of this pilot project, we carried out a comparison of the scores obtained by first‐year medical students during the first block examination on the musculoskeletal system in 2017 and 2018. The academic performance of first‐year medical students in 2018 served as the experimental variable, while that of students in 2017 served as the control, since they did not receive any help during their first year. In addition to this, a survey addressing satisfaction was also developed for this first phase of the study. The latter was sent to all 74 first year medical students at UCC. The survey included a 5‐point questionnaire using a Likert scale response ranking. Preliminary positive results were obtained for both the academic performance comparison and the survey. These results represent an exciting opportunity for the development of innovative approaches for teaching and learning anatomy that transform the traditional didactic methods towards more engaging and stimulating methods of learning. The analysis of academic performance regarding the remaining three examination blocks (thorax, abdominopelvic cavity, and head and neck) are pending and will take place as the course progresses. Nevertheless, findings for this first phase of the project support our hypothesis that second‐ and third‐year medical students are a viable educational resource promoting professionalism, critical thinking, and instructions.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.
The flexor digitorum brevis belongs to the superficial layer of muscles of the foot and serves to flex the digits II–V at the proximal interphalangeal joint. Its tendons typically insert on the sides of the middle phalanx of each of the lateral four digits. During routine dissection for a human gross anatomy course, we discovered a bilateral variation in the structure of the flexor digitorum brevis in the feet of an older female cadaver. The variation consists of a bilaterally missing tendon to the digiti minimi (fifth digit). Further dissections were carried out on an additional 10 cadavers in the gross anatomy lab to ascertain the presence or absence of this variation, which is frequent in some populations. Preliminary results indicate that the variation is present in 40% of the Puerto Rican population. The flexor digitorum brevis develops embryologically from anterior condensations of abaxial muscle cell precursors starting at 6 weeks. This variation in particular is not expected to have serious functional or evolutionary consequences in humans, as flexion of the toes is not as important in human locomotor function as it would be in chimpanzees or other hominoids. A lack of functional consequences may result in greater variation than would otherwise be expected. Clinically, the tendon of the flexor digitorum brevis to digit V is often used for flexion of the proximal and intermediate phalanges. Our results suggest that because of the variation’s lack of functional adversities, the absence of this tendon might become increasingly prevalent in the population and that deeper muscles might become hypertrophied to supplement the action of the missing tendon.
Knowledge of the arterial supply of the human kidney is of special interest due to its variable nature as well as the clinical implications during renovascular interventions. This case report describes an unusual pattern in the arterial blood supply of the kidneys. The variation was discovered in an elderly Puerto Rican female during the course of a routine dissection on an embalmed cadaver. The left kidney received arterial supply from two accessory renal arteries. An upper accessory renal artery branched directly from the aorta and entered the kidney at the upper pole. A lower accessory renal artery branched from the main renal artery and entered the main part of the kidney at the level of the hilum. Additional branches appear to supply the left suprarenal gland both directly from the aorta and from the upper accessory renal artery. The right kidney was missing due to unknown causes occurring during the life of the individual. This variant is uncommon, and suggests an atypical embryological development. As the kidney ascends, it gathers its blood supply from nearby arteries, and when it reaches its final destination, one artery remains while the rest degenerate. When this process fails, multiple renal arteries are present in the adult, each with an important function that is not supplemental to that of the main renal artery. However, these extra renal arteries may represent the formation of additional blood vessels rather than an embryological vestige. Understanding these types of variations may help avoid clinical complications, especially during radiological examinations and surgical approaches, such as partial nephrectomies. This is especially true of the extra hilar artery occurring at the level of the hilum, which might be confused for a typical renal artery during imaging.
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