Post-mortem examination of the heart in cases of sudden death.

Sudden unexpected death is an important topic of forensic medicine. Several papers have been published on the morphological changes of the coronary arteries and the myocardium in sudden cardiac death. Forensic pathology demands more and more accurate methods of postmortem diagnosis of early ischaemic lesions of the heart muscle that occur shortly before death and which, in the absence of other explanations, may presumably be related to the cause of death. The cause of death is often evident from post-mortem findings, still in a number of cases the diagnosis may be doubtful. The application of electron microscopy has increased rapidly over recent years and the electron microscopic investigation of post-mortem biopsy material may be useful in narrowing down the cause of death. This report presents the results of electron microscopic and cytochemical studies of the myocardium in cases when death had occurred at a precisely recorded time.