Hey, what's up everybody? This is Dr. B. We're going to take a look at the vertebral column. The first vertebra we're going to look at in the vertebral column is going to be our lumbar vertebra.
Now when you look at the lumbar vertebra, you'll notice that it has a very large vertebral body. All right, this is the vertebral body here. Okay, it's going to be the largest because the lumbar vertebra are at the base of the spine.
So they have to support all the other vertebra stacked on top of them. The lumbar vertebra is going to face anteriorly, posteriorly. here we're going to have the spinous process. You'll notice that the spinous process on the lumbar vertebra is a very rounded, kind of dull spinous process, and it's going to point almost directly posteriorly.
All right. Now, Now, in the center of our vertebra, we have the vertebral foramen. Vertebral foramen is where the spinal cord is going to pass through. And on either side, laterally, we have two transverse processes.
So these are your transverse processes. This is the spinous process. The spinous process goes posterior, and those are the bumps that you feel when you run your hand down the middle of someone's back. Now, attaching the vertebral body to the posterior vertebral arch. are going to be two structures, one right here and one right here.
These are the pedicles, right? The pedicles are then going to join up with the lamina, which we have on either side right here, and they will complete the posterior portion of the vertebra, which is the vertebral arch. When we take a look at our thoracic vertebra, you'll notice that thoracic vertebra, the vertebral body is going to be considerably smaller than we had with our lumbar vertebra, but you'll also notice that the spinous process is going to going to be more of a blade shape and it's pointing almost directly inferior, all right, where we had a more posterior spinous process in the thoracic or in the lumbar vertebra. We have the same structures, vertebral body, spinous process, transverse processes, lamina, and then pedicle, all right, but we also are going to have on the thoracic vertebra an articular facet for our rib.
We have 12 thoracic vertebrae, we have 12 pair of ribs. So each thoracic vertebra is going to have two facets, one right here at the superior part of the vertebral body and one right here at the superior part of the vertebral body. That's going to be where the ribs come off.
The ribs will actually come off and meet up with the transverse processes and come around to attach to the costal cartilages which is then going to attach them to the sternum. Now to tell the difference between our lumbar and thoracic obviously. you can look at the size of the vertebral bodies. You can look at the shape and the size of the spinous processes, but you can also look at the thoracic vertebra and you can see that it looks like a giraffe. All right, here's the little horns.
Here's the giraffe's ears, long neck. So when you think of thoracic vertebra, you can think that it looks kind of like a giraffe. Now as we move into the cervical vertebra, you're going to see that we have three different types of cervical vertebrae.
All right, the cervical vertebrae are going to be our typical cervical vertebrae which we have right here. This is going to be the vertebrae that we find from areas between C3 and C7. Then we have our C2 which is our axis and then we have our C1 which is our atlas.
All right, so atlas is going to sit on top of axis like that. but you'll notice when you look at the cervical vertebra that the one main difference between the cervical vertebra that we have with our thoracic vertebra and our lumbar vertebra is going to be that we have three foramen all right with our thoracic and our lumbar we just had our vertebral foramen with these three we're going to have a vertebral foramen but we're also going to have in the transverse processes two transverse foramen so let's take a look first at our cervical vertebra you okay, our typical cervical vertebra. So again, we've got our vertebral body here, all right, we have our vertebral foramen here, we have our lamina, okay, we have our pedicle, we have our transverse processes, and then you'll notice in each transverse process, we have additional foramen, okay, those will be our transverse foramen. Now, you'll also take notice that the spinous process on most of our cervical vertebra is going to be bifurcated, okay, which means... it has two different points.
So this will be our regular cervical vertebra and you'll see it differs from our C2 which is our axis because axis is going to have this process of bones sticking up right here which is called the DENS process. So with our C2 vertebra this is axis we have the DENS process. We have our spinous process, we have our transverse foramen on both sides right here, and we have our vertebral foramen. Now sitting at the very top we have atlas, all right. In atlas we have a large vertebral foramen here.
Part of the reason why it's so large is because some of that vertebral foramen is going to be occupied by this dens process. The dens process allows for C1 to sit on top of and rotate around the dense process. The majority of the rotation that we get in the cervical spine is going to come between these two vertebrae. Now you'll also notice that because of that dense process, process, we lack a vertebral body here at the anterior part of C1.
So on C1, we have some new parts that we haven't seen so far. One is the anterior arch. This is our anterior arch right here. The posterior arch is back here.
We have transverse foramen again because it is a cervical vertebra. Those transverse foramen are going to be in our transverse processes. And we're also going to find the articular surface.
for the dens. Okay, our tick articular surface for the dens are these two flat surfaces here Which are going to articulate with these two flat surfaces right here And that's your c1 c2 typical cervical vertebra thoracic vertebra and lumbar vertebra