A morphometric study on the third trochanter in the human femur

Abstract

Sometimes a rather oblong, rounded and conical protrusion may be observed on, the upper end of the gluteal tuberosity to which some fibres of m. gluteus maximus are attached in the femur. It such a condition exists, the formation located in the posterior of the lesser trochanter is called third trochanter. It has often been made use of the incidence of third trochanter, a nonmetric infracranial characteristic for quantitative investigations on human relatives. In this work, it has been attempted to investigate the third trochanter incidence and morphometric features of the femurs displaying it. A total of 230 femurs have been used in this investigation. Of these, 38 right and 52 left femurs, a total of 90, belonged to female cases and 140 (55 right and 85 left femurs) to male cases. 13 parameters were established for morphometric measurements from every femur and the results obtained were evaluated by SPSS (version 9.05). As a result of morphometric evaluations, if was concluded that there is a relation in between the proximal diaphyseal antero-posterior diameter (b) and the existence of the third trochanter.