How many nerve fibers innervate the human glans clitoris: a histomorphometric evaluation of the dorsal nerve of the clitoris
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: It is frequently quoted in mainstream media that the clitoris has "8000 nerve endings." However, no study has yet quantified the number of nerve fibers (axons) innervating the human clitoris. The dorsal nerves of the clitoris (DNCs) are the primary source of sensation and somatic clitoral innervation. Therefore, reporting the number of axons in the DNCs is an important step in our understanding of clitoral innervation and sexual response with implications for many fields of medical practice. The purpose of this study is to quantify the mean number of axons in the human DNCs and to report the approximate mean number of nerve fibers that innervate the human glans clitoris. METHODS: DNC samples were obtained from 7 transmasculine patients undergoing gender-affirming phalloplasty surgery. At the time of nerve coaptation, a small excess of the DNC (5 mm) was collected for analysis at the proximal level of the clitoral body, just distal of the emergence of the DNCs from underneath the pubic symphysis. Samples were placed into 3% glutaraldehyde fixative, postfixed in 1% osmium tetroxide, and serially dehydrated in ethanol and toluene. Samples were then embedded in araldite, sectioned on an ultramicrotome into 1-μm cross sections, and counterstained with 1% toluidine blue. Histomorphometric evaluation was performed at 1000x magnification with a Leitz Laborlux S microscope and image analysis software (Clemex Vision Professional) to obtain an axon counts. Descriptive statistics were performed to yield a mean and standard deviation of the number of axons in the DNCs. Assuming anatomic symmetry between bilateral DNCs, mean total number of somatic nerve fibers innervating the human glans clitoris was obtained by doubling the mean count of the DNCs. RESULTS: Seven sample DNCs were collected. Of those, 5 were analyzed as 2 did not have sufficient nerve tissue present. The mean number of nerve fibers in the human DNCs was 5140 (SD = 218.4). The mean number of myelinated nerve fibers innervating the human clitoris was 10,281 (SD = 436.8). CONCLUSION: This study is the first to report the number of axons in the human DNC, at a mean 5140. Given the bilateral nature of clitoral innervation and symmetry of anatomic structures, the approximate mean number of myelinated axons that innervate the human glans clitoris is 10,280. When the uncaptured unmyelinated fibers and contributions from the cavernosal innervation are accounted for, it is clear that far Moree than 8000 axons innervate the human clitoris.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it