1Department of Forensic Medicine & Toxicology, Shree M. P. Shah Medical College, Jamnagar (Gujarat), India
2Department of Pathology, Shree M. P. Shah Medical College, Jamnagar (Gujarat), India
3Department of Physiology, Shree M. P. Shah Medical College, Jamnagar (Gujarat), India
Online published on 22 May, 2014.
Myocardial infarction (MI) is the most common cause of death for which the largest number of autopsies are done.
A clinical study was done to determine those cases numerically smaller but medico-legally more important in which some unnatural event like a road accident, is suspected to die due to acute myocardial infarction. The likelihood of identifying an early infarct minimizes false positivity in cases of sudden death.
A histochemical study on 100 hearts was carried out with using haematoxylin & eosin as a routine stain and Triphenyl tetrazolium chloride as gross marker, the latter can detect infarcts of less than 6 hours of age which help to assess the actual age of the infarct and confirmation of myocardial infarction as the cause of demise.
68% of cases showed positive result with TTC staining while only 25% of cases showed positive result with H & E stain. 75% of cases showed the age of infarction within 5 to 8 hours which made possible to detect early infarction by TTC staining. In 82.3% of cases gross examination did not reveal any evidence of infarction, but were revealed by TTC staining.
Triphenyl tetrazolium chloride is the detector of earliest changes of infarction in comparison to gross and microscopic changes in the infracted heart.
Triphenyl tetrazolium chloride, early infarct
