Cardiac extirpation and reimplantation is the most reliable method for complete cardiac denervation in dogs, as other surgical methods frequently result in incomplete denervation.
Rigorous testing procedures assessed the extent of extrinsic cardiac denervation in three groups of animals subjected to cardiac extirpation and reimplantation (E in all eight, moderate to large cardio-accelerator responses were elicited from the distal vagosympathetic trunk after atropinization. There is little correlation between the over-all cardiac responses persisting in all operated animals and total cardiac catecholamine content, or between cardio-accelerator responses and right atrial catecholamine content.
Peiss et al. (Fri,) studied this question.