Anatomical indicators of dominance among the coronary arteries in goats

Abstract

The growing interest in the use of coronary arteries of goats in researches to posterior application in human hearts justifying the more detailed anatomical knowledge of this arteries mainly to evaluate their similarities and differences with the human arterial pattern. However, we not found anatomical studies on indicators of coronary dominance in goats. In the literature, we found only the definition of three kinds of pattern in human hearts: right dominance, balanced and left dominance. To this work we used 31 goats hearts, of both sexes and fixed and conserved in formalin at 10%. The branches of coronary arteries were dissected with special attention to the levels considered as references. The branch present in the interventricular subsinuosis sulcus had origin in the circumflex branch that is a branch of the left coronary artery. The interventricular subsinuosis branch presented at least a little branch that exceeded the crux cordis. The region of the apex presented predominance of the left coronary artery branches: interventricular paraconalis and interventricular subsinuosis. The left coronary artery, through their branches, also dominated in total length and the issue to ventricular branches including for the right ventricle. Using references to various criteria including, those proposed for this research, we find that in goats hearts the arterial pattern is left dominance. The diversity in relation to the arterial pattern between goats and humans requires that in the experiments performed in the coronary goats, this important difference is observed.