study of variations of sacral hiatus.

Volume : VII, Issue : IV, April - 2018

Rabiya Amin, Shaheen Shahdad, Ubaid Ali, Maheen Nazir, Basit Aslam

Sacrum is formed by the fusion of five sacral verteae and forms the lower part of verteal column. The opening present at the

lower end of sacral canal is known as sacral hiatus. Anatomical variations in morphology of sacral hiatus are important clinically

as 25% failure rate of caudal epidural block has been reported in literature. The failure rate of this procedure may be due to variant

anatomical features of sacral hiatus. Hence knowing the anatomical variations in shape,size, level of apex and baseof sacral hiatus

is of paramount importance to clinicians to reduce failure rate of caudal epidural block. For this reason literature search was done

on 50 dry clean human Sacra which were taken from Department of Anatomy, Govt Medical College Srinagar j and k

india.Various shapes of sacral hiatus were observed which included inverted U (36%), inverted V (22%), irregular (16%),

dumbbell (8%) and agenesis (4%). The apex of sacral hiatus was commonly found at the level of 4th sacral vertea in 60 % of

cases while base was commonly found at 5th sacral verteae in 86 % of the cases. The length of the hiatus was between 11 to 20

mm in 28 sacrum (56%).