Nerve · Neck

Recurrent laryngeal nerve

Nervus laryngeus recurrens

The nerve that reaches the voice box by going the long way round. It leaves the vagus low down — in the chest on the left, at the root of the neck on the right — hooks under the arch of the aorta or the subclavian artery, and climbs back up the groove between the trachea and the oesophagus to enter the larynx from below. The detour is inherited from the embryonic branchial arches, and it is why the left nerve is far the longer of the two and why part of its course belongs to the chest rather than the neck. It supplies every intrinsic muscle of the larynx except cricothyroid, including the only pair that pulls the vocal folds apart to open the airway, and carries sensation from the mucosa below the folds.