THE ANATOMIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE THIRD HEAD OF BICEPS BRANCHII MUSCLE IN A COLOMBIAN POPULATION

summary: we report the appearance of variations of the biceps brachii muscle and describe their anatomic characteristics in our population. a prospective evaluation was conducted on cadavers at the morgue of the "nueva granada" military university (umng) - school of medicine in santafe de bogota, colombia. thirty-two arms of 16 cadavers were included. anatomic description was achieved by measurements of length, width, thickness, insertions, relations, innervating branches and blood supply. a third head for the biceps brachii muscle was found in 6 arms (37.5%, n=16). it appeared most frequently in the right arm (31.25%, n=16) and found bilaterally in 2(12.5%, n=16) cases; arising from the lower third the humeral shaft at 12.82 ± 0.59 cms. from the external humeral condyle and with a total length of 12.9 ± 0.29 cms. these results provide an anatomic description of the characteristics of this variation in the population studied and also is the first report of this accessory head among colombians