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Authors & Affiliations
Maeva Badre, Christophe Lamy, Priscilla Soulié, Jasmine Abdulcadir, Marie-Luce Bochaton-Piallat, Céline Brockmann
Abstract
Lack of knowledge about the functional anatomy of the clitoris still persists and negatively impacts medical care for girls, women and gender diverse individuals with a clitoris. It maintains harmful practices and beliefs, such as Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C), which involve nerve damage. Precise knowledge of clitoral anatomy and histology is crucial in vulvar and vaginal surgeries for malignant and benign conditions, such as urinary incontinence or cysts, as well as in gender affirmation surgeries or reconstructive surgery after FGM/C. This interdisciplinary project aims at describing the functional architecture of the clitoris, with a focus on its understudied areas, innervation, vascular architecture and smooth musculature characteristics. By combining anatomical dissection, post-mortem MRI, immunohistochemistry and 3D reconstructions after tissue clearing and imaging, we investigated the innervation of the organ, including its sensory corpuscular nerve endings, Krause “pleasure” corpuscles. This project will enable us to generate a new multiscale multimodal atlas of the clitoris functional architecture that will serve as a reference in the clinic, in research and in educational settings.