Consideration of the potential courses of the common iliac artery

Abstract

We encountered a rare case of the left common iliac artery in a 92-year-old Japanese female cadaver during dissection practice for medical students. The artery entered into the small pelvis without branching to the external iliac artery. There, it went down slightly medially and then turned laterally and passed behind the first sacral nerve. The artery ran anterolaterally further and returned to the greater pelvis and became the external iliac artery, which continued to the femoral artery as usual. During the course in the small pelvis, the artery branched to give rise to each branch of the internal iliac artery. We speculate that in the present case, a communication between the median sacral artery and the superior gluteal artery, passing behind the first sacral nerve, enlarged and compensated the usual common iliac artery.

Axial and Sciatic Arteries: A New Interpretation

“…It has been suggested that the common iliac artery does not bifurcate when it compensates for the internal iliac artery, but that in addition to the external iliac artery it gives branches to the pelvis: this is the case particularly in congenital absence of the internal iliac artery with persistence of the sciatic artery (Okamoto et al, 2005). The common iliac continues as the inferior gluteal artery, while the external iliac gives pelvic branches such as the internal pudendal, umbilical, uterine, inferior vesical and obturator arteries (Okamoto et al).…”

Estimation of the functional role of arterial pathways to the buttock circulation during treadmill walking in patients with claudication

“…At the inferior mesenteric artery level, contradictory results are found from the literature with regard to the participation of this artery to the pelvic circulation (9,18,21). The median sacral artery is reported as a cause of endoleak after endovascular repair of aortic aneurysms (12) or as a collateral route to the occlusion of the common iliac artery (24). We observed an inverse, but nonsignificant, relationship between the LMD of both the inferior mesenteric and median sacral pathways and DROP buttock in the present study.…”