Immunocytochemical diagnosis of early myocardial ischaemic/hypoxic damage

The sensitive and reliable dinitrophenyl (DNP) hapten sandwich staining (DHSS) procedure (B. Jasani et al., Virchows Arch (Pathol. Anat.), 406 (1985) 441-448) was used to study the distribution of immunoperoxidase staining seen with antibodies to seven protein markers in post-mortem heart tissue. This was obtained from 12 cases with macroscopic myocardial infarction and 17 cases without myocardial infarction (10 with and 7 without significant coronary artery atherosclerosis). The immunostaining patterns were compared with the appearances seen in adjacent sections stained by the routine haematoxylin and eosin (H & E) and phosphotungstic acid haematoxylin (PTAH) methods and a method previously recommended for the detection of early myocardial infarction, the haematoxylin basic fuchsin picric acid (HBFP) stain. Loss of immunostaining with an antibody to myoglobin was found to be a reliable and more objective marker of both early and established myocardial infarction compared with the histological stains. Antibodies to myosin, caeruloplasmin, C-reactive protein and pre-albumin gave similar but less reliable results, whilst those to complement factor C3b and alpha-1 anti-trypsin gave the least reliable results for early myocardial ischaemic/hypoxic damage. The immunocytochemical results are considered sufficiently encouraging to extend the work to a large number of sudden death cases in order to establish a new, more reliable approach to the detection of histologically latent ischaemic/hypoxic damage in the myocardium.