What are intrafascicularly terminating muscle fibers When qu

What are intrafascicularly terminating muscle fibers? When quantifying muscle fiber number or size, why can these fibers introduce \"artifacts\" that cause error in data interpretation?

Solution

Long skeletal muscles will often have many shorter muscle fibers within them that do not run the entire distance of the muscle. Instead, they will narrow down and their tapered end will attach to the endomysium of another muscle fiber. Such, short muscle fibers are called intrafascicularly terminating muscle fibers.

These form sources of error in data interpretation in two major ways: