Heart weight must not be measured before dissection during autopsies

During autopsies, weighing the heart is a standard procedure. In addition to myocardial pathologies, heart size, and ventricular wall thickness, heart weight is a common parameter to describe cardiac pathology and should be recorded as accurately as possible. To date, there exists no standard for re...

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Autores principales: Lohner, Larissa, Sinning, Christoph, Suling, Anna Isabella, Tse, Rexson, Garland, Jack, Ondruschka, Benjamin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10567818/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37723344
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00414-023-03089-9
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author Lohner, Larissa
Sinning, Christoph
Suling, Anna Isabella
Tse, Rexson
Garland, Jack
Ondruschka, Benjamin
author_facet Lohner, Larissa
Sinning, Christoph
Suling, Anna Isabella
Tse, Rexson
Garland, Jack
Ondruschka, Benjamin
author_sort Lohner, Larissa
collection PubMed
description During autopsies, weighing the heart is a standard procedure. In addition to myocardial pathologies, heart size, and ventricular wall thickness, heart weight is a common parameter to describe cardiac pathology and should be recorded as accurately as possible. To date, there exists no standard for recording heart weight at autopsy, although some authors recommend weighing the heart after dissection and removal of blood and blood clots. In the study presented, the hearts of 58 decedents were weighed after being dissected out of the pericardial sac (a), after dissection using the short-axis or inflow-outflow method with manual removal of blood and blood clots (b), and after rinsing and drying (c). Depending on the dissection method, the heart weight was 7.8% lower for the inflow-outflow method and 11.6% lower for the short-axis method after dissection compared to before and correspondingly 2.9% to 5% lower again after rinsing and drying respectively. Accordingly, the heart should be dissected, blood and blood clots removed, rinsed with water, and dried with a surgical towel after dissection, before weighing.
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spelling pubmed-105678182023-10-13 Heart weight must not be measured before dissection during autopsies Lohner, Larissa Sinning, Christoph Suling, Anna Isabella Tse, Rexson Garland, Jack Ondruschka, Benjamin Int J Legal Med Original Article During autopsies, weighing the heart is a standard procedure. In addition to myocardial pathologies, heart size, and ventricular wall thickness, heart weight is a common parameter to describe cardiac pathology and should be recorded as accurately as possible. To date, there exists no standard for recording heart weight at autopsy, although some authors recommend weighing the heart after dissection and removal of blood and blood clots. In the study presented, the hearts of 58 decedents were weighed after being dissected out of the pericardial sac (a), after dissection using the short-axis or inflow-outflow method with manual removal of blood and blood clots (b), and after rinsing and drying (c). Depending on the dissection method, the heart weight was 7.8% lower for the inflow-outflow method and 11.6% lower for the short-axis method after dissection compared to before and correspondingly 2.9% to 5% lower again after rinsing and drying respectively. Accordingly, the heart should be dissected, blood and blood clots removed, rinsed with water, and dried with a surgical towel after dissection, before weighing. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2023-09-18 2023 /pmc/articles/PMC10567818/ /pubmed/37723344 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00414-023-03089-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Original Article
Lohner, Larissa
Sinning, Christoph
Suling, Anna Isabella
Tse, Rexson
Garland, Jack
Ondruschka, Benjamin
Heart weight must not be measured before dissection during autopsies
title Heart weight must not be measured before dissection during autopsies
title_full Heart weight must not be measured before dissection during autopsies
title_fullStr Heart weight must not be measured before dissection during autopsies
title_full_unstemmed Heart weight must not be measured before dissection during autopsies
title_short Heart weight must not be measured before dissection during autopsies
title_sort heart weight must not be measured before dissection during autopsies
topic Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10567818/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37723344
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00414-023-03089-9
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