The crescent use of the tendons of the gracile and semitendinous muscles in knee ligament reconstruction procedures was accompanied by an increase of the number of complications originated by their removal, such as: tibial collateral ligament injury, saphenous nerve injury, wrong removal of the sartorio muscle tendon, the very section of the tendons, and increase of surgical procedure time due to inexperience or lack of knowledge of the knee medial region anatomy. (1-6) As the removal of such tendons has been a limiting factor in some orthopaedic procedures, we conducted this study by dissecting 30 cadaver knees, with the following purpose: to locate the insertion of the gracile and semitendinous muscles in the tibia; to check the correlation, if existent, between this location with the cadaver height and to evaluate the potential anatomical changes. We observed that the gracile muscle tendon insertion was, in average, at 4.6 cm below knee joint surface, and the semitendinous was, in average, at 7.4 cm. There is a correlation between people’s heights and the location of those tendons. Gracile and semitendinous muscles usually present some kind of anatomical change, with the semitendinous accessory insertion being the most frequent one, accounting for 70%, followed by the merge between them, which accounted for 56%.
Knee; Tendons; Anterior cruciate ligament; Posterior cruciate ligament; Tibia
