Dying from cardiac tamponade.docVIP

World Journal of Emergency Surgery BioMedCentral Research article Open Access Dying from cardiac tamponade Aravind Swaminathan1, Karikalan Kandaswamy2, Manish Powari1 and Joseph Mathew*1 Address: 1Department of Histopathology, Royal Cornwall Hospital, Truro, UK. TR1 3 LJ and 2Department of Cardiology, Royal Cornwall Hospital, Truro, UK. TR1 3 LJ Email: Aravind Swaminathan - aravindan.swaminathan@yahoo.co.in; Karikalan Kandaswamy - Karikalan.Kandasamy@rcht.cornwall.nhs.uk; Manish Powari - mpowari@yahoo.co.uk; Joseph Mathew* - joe.mathew@rcht.cornwall.nhs.uk * Corresponding author Published: 6 September 2007 Received: 23 April 2007 Accepted: 6 September 2007 World Journal of Emergency Surgery 2007, 2:22 doi:10.1186/1749-7922-2-22 This article is available from: /content/2/1/22 ? 2007 Swaminathan et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: To determine the causes of cardiac tamponade (CT), focussing especially on haemopericardium (HP), as a terminal mode of death, within a 430,000 rural English population. Methods: Our hospital mortuary register and, all postmortem reports between 1995 and 2004 inclusive, were interrogated for patients dying of CT or HP. The causes of CT/HP and selected morphological characteristics were then determined. Results: 14,368 postmortems were performed in this period: of these, 461 patients died of CT. Three cases were due to non-haemorrhagic pericardial effusion. HP accounted for the remaining 458 cases of which, five were post-traumatic, 311 followed rupture of an acute myocardial infarction (RAMI), 138 after intra-pericardial rupture of dissecting ascending aortic aneurysms (RD3A) and four were due to miscellan