A Morphological Study on Intimal Changes of the Coronary Arteries in Newborns

Arteriosclerosis is a silently progressive disease for a long period of time. To elucidate the initial changes, whether pathological or not, might be very useful to prevent its progress. Therefore the left main trunk and the proximal portion of the left anterior descending artery in eleven cases of newborns, composed of four cases of extremely immature newborns, three cases of newborns with very low birth weight, a case of low birth weight newborn, and three cases of mature newborns, died in and about the day of birth were examined light and electron microscopically.Not only discontinuation and splitting of the internal elastic lamina but also factor VIII related antigen suggests that intimal thickening is not an artificial but a really organic change. The absence of the intimal changes mentioned above in the interlobar arteries of the kidneys, muscular arteries as large as the proximal portion of the coronary arteries, proved that they are independent of postmortem autolysis. Since degrees of the intimal changes are independent of duration of the life, they may manifest themselves in the gestational period. In some cases with fairly marked eccentric intimal thickening the change may play a role of a congenital predilection for ischemic heart disease, lowering the threshould of clinical manifestation of the disease due to luminal stenosis in the other points of the artery.