Right heart ischemia in cases of sepsis.
Forensic Sci Int
; 259: 106-9, 2016 Feb.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-26773220
ABSTRACT
Data from the literature suggest that cases of sepsis complicated by right ventricular (RV) dysfunction have poorer prognosis. In these cases progressive hypoperfusion associated to increasing, injury-related, pulmonary vascular resistance account for RV ischemia. In the present analysis, we wanted to evaluate whether prevalent RV cardiac ischemic damage could be detected in a series of fatal sepsis cases. We retrospectively investigated 20 cases of sepsis that underwent forensic autopsy (study group-11â, 9â, mean age 57 years) and compared them to a group of 20 cases of hanging (hanging group-4 â, 16 â, mean age 44 years) as well as to a group of 20 cases of myocardial infarction (MI group-9 â, 11 â, mean age 65 years), as examples of cardiac damage due to global hypoxia during agony and ischemic damage, respectively. We performed immunohistochemistry with the antibodies anti-fibronectin and C5b-9. The reactions were semiquantitively classified and the groups were compared. In 30% of the cases of sepsis prevalent RV ischemic damage could be detected with the antibody anti-fibronectin. This expression was significantly different from that observed in cases of MI (p=0.028) and hanging (p<0.001). Our study showed that, in cases of fatal sepsis, prevalent RV ischemic damage occurred in a substantial minority of cases.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Myocardial Ischemia
/
Sepsis
/
Heart Ventricles
Type of study:
Observational_studies
/
Risk_factors_studies
Limits:
Adult
/
Aged
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
/
Middle aged
Language:
En
Journal:
Forensic Sci Int
Year:
2016
Document type:
Article