Comparison of histopathological and triphenyl tetrazolium chloride test in diagnosing myocardial infarction: An autopsy study.

Background: Sudden and unexpected deaths are increasing drastically. The main cause of sudden death is cardiovascular disease, out of which coronary artery disease predominates forming 80% of the cases. Most of the time, detecting early changes in myocardial infarction during the autopsy is challenging since gross infarct changes do not appear until after 24 to 48 hours of myocardial ischemia injury. So, the aim of this study was to compare two test to detect early changes of Myocardial Infarction one by using Triphenyl Tetrazolium Chloride (TTC) staining of the myocardial tissue, during autopsy and other by histopathological examination.

Methods: The sample size of 60 hearts taken from all the sudden deaths cases brought to Mortuary with suspected cause of death due to cardiac origin. The heart was obtained from the deceased by standard post-mortem technique. Serial full-thickness transverse sections of the heart were taken at 2 cm intervals from the apex to the atrioventricular groove. All the serial slices of heart are taken for histochemical staining and TTC staining.

Results: In histopathological examination 34 hearts were diagnosed with myocardial infarction and 26 hearts reported non myocardial infarction. With TTC 40 hearts remained unstained suggestive of myocardial infarction and 20 hearts were stained suggestive of non-infarcted hearts. TTC staining in our study shows an accuracy of 88.33%.

Conclusion: The result of this study shows that the Triphenyl Tetrazolium Chloride test, a histochemical staining technique of heart, is reliable approach for forensic pathologists to diagnose early myocardial infarction during the post-mortem examination.