![\"Coronary](\"https:\/\/wordpress.forensicpath.us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/DSC_0006-scaled.jpg\")
<\/a>This is a case of a young adult woman who gave birth to a healthy term infant about two weeks before death.\u00a0 Her husband noted that she was seizing one night in bed, and then collapsed.\u00a0 At autopsy, she was generally healthy.\u00a0 There was a little bit of necrotic retained placenta still in the uterus, but nothing else of note.\u00a0 I didn’t notice much on the LAD grossly, but when I grabbed a section along with the anterior left ventricle, as I have a habit of doing, to my surprise, there was a small dissection there.\u00a0 Close examination of the myocardium revealed acute and subacute microinfarctions.<\/p>\n
In forensic pathology, we are specifically concerned with discovering causes of sudden death — prolonged illnesses do not become Medical Examiner cases for the most part.\u00a0 The heart, lungs, and brain are the high value targets for investigation, and in relatively young people without obvious gross lesions, the heart is number one in my experience.\u00a0 Accordingly, I take lots of sections of the heart for histologic evaluation in these cases.\u00a0 Normally, I take a section from each quadrant of the left ventricle (counting the IVS as left ventricle), one section from the right ventricle, a couple of slices through the sinoatrial node, and a section around the atrioventricular node.\u00a0 The atrioventricular node section is particularly valuable to me, but I’ll talk about that in a different post.<\/p>\n
Here’s a section of the distal left anterior descending coronary artery in this case:<\/p>\n<\/a>