ArticleInternational journal of legal medicine2023
Heart weight must not be measured before dissection during autopsies.
Article in International journal of legal medicine, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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4 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- Assessing the accuracy of echocardiographic ventricular heart mass estimates: a comparison with autopsy heart weight.Forensic science, medicine, and pathology · 2026Article
- Comparison of ante- and postmortem ventricular wall thickness using echocardiography and autopsy findings.Virchows Archiv : an international journal of pathology · 2025Article
- Exploratory DNA methylation analysis in post-mortem heart tissue of sudden unexplained death.Clinical epigenetics · 2024Article
- Letter to the editor regarding the article "Heart weight must not be measured before dissection during autopsies".International journal of legal medicine · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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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