Neck of Femur Fractures; Roadside to Resus
Highlights
- The Anatomy of the Femur Neck
Key takeaways:
- The femoral neck is the weakest part of the femur,.
- This weakness is due to the junctional location between the femoral head and the shaft.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
And so the femoral neck is the weakest part of the femur. Now why is that? Well, primarily it's because it joins those other two key anatomical parts of the femur, the head and the shaft. And that junctional location between those two other points makes it much more vulnerable to stress than the other regions. So let's think about that anatomy a little bit further. So at the very top of the femur, the femoral head, that nice kind of rounded area articulates with the acetabulum of the pelvis in that classic ball and socket joint of the hip. And actually the femoral head sits really deeply within the acetabulum, giving it great protection from some pretty significant forces that it can be exposed to. And then the femoral neck runs from the head of the femur across to the top of the femoral shaft. And where the neck joins onto the shaft, we find two lumpy bits, the greater and the lesser tracancers. I run out of clever words there. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, the lumpy bits. I know what you mean. Yeah, yeah. So the tracancers are important because there's a really tough fibrous capsule that runs from the acetabulum of the pelvis to the greater and the lesser tracancers, which means that the majority of the femoral neck is covered by this capsule with only the really distal areas of it left exposed. And this capsule brings great strength and stability to the hip joint and it's composed of three really major ligaments. And I think one last but really important point on the anatomy is that the blood supply for the femoral head runs along the surface of the femoral neck. And so if the neck gets damaged, then that can compromise the blood supply and that then can cause all (Time 0:04:31)