ABSTRACT
This Chapter is a compulsory preface on materials, methods and definitions for the un derstanding of data and results which will be reported in the next sections.
University of Milan, Italy (Baroldi et al, 1974) and 100 at the Toronto General Hospital, Canada (Silver et al, 1980) were studied. All had the clinical diagnosis established in a coronary care unit by alterations in ECG tracings and blood enzyme levels including isoenzymes. No patient had another form of heart disease or developed the infarction as a complication of a clinical or surgical procedure and none had coronary vascular surgery, angioplasty or intense resuscitation attempts. All hearts at postmortem showed histologic evidence of infarct necrosis with an associated polymorphonuclear leukocyte infiltration. Thus, patients were selected for study only if they had unequivocal clinical and histological evidence of a myocardial infarction without other diseases and/or iatrogenic damage.
