Cervical spinal nerve 8
spinal nerve of the cervical segment
The cervical spinal nerve 8 (C8) is a spinal nerve of the cervical segment.
It originates from the spinal column from below the cervical vertebra 7 (C7).
Innervation
The C8 nerve forms part of the radial and ulnar nerves via the brachial plexus, and therefore has motor and sensory function in the upper limb.
Sensory
The C8 nerve receives sensory afferents from the C8 dermatome. This consists of all the skin on the little finger, and continuing up slightly past the wrist on the palmar and dorsal aspects of the hand and forearm. Clinically, a test of the pad of the little finger is often used to assess C8 integrity.
Motor
The C8 nerve contributes to the motor innervation of many of the muscles in the trunk and upper limb. Its primary function is the flexion of the fingers, and this is used as the clinical test for C8 integrity, in conjunction with the finger jerk reflex.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Cervical spinal nerve 8” as spinal nerve of the cervical segment. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5065357. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cervical spinal nerve 8” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.