Resumen

DE SUAREZ, Claudia  y  AVILAN ROVIRA, José Miguel. Pesos en corazones normales de Venezuela . Gac Méd Caracas [online]. 2004, vol.112, n.1, pp.42-48. ISSN 0367-4762.

The heart weight is the most important mass measure as it constitutes the indispensable element to diagnose heart hypertrophy, risk factor for acute cardiovascular events. At the moment we do not have normal values for the national heart weigths and we use data from other ethnic groups as a reference. Our goal was to analyse the weight in a sample of 141 macro and microscopical "normal" hearts, from the Forensic medical service of the Metropolitan area. The estimated linear equation with 33 hearts’ weights and the age from people under 16 years old was 27+10.6x. On the 108 hearts from people between 16 and 80 years old, 95 % confidence limits vary from 276.2 g to 294.4 g and a general (both genders) mean weight of 285.7 g. For males the mean heart weight was 294.4 g, 36 g more than the female mean heart weight (258.4 g). This difference reach statistical significance (P< 0.01). Adult hearts weights were normally distributed, according to the goodness of fit test (P= 0.83) and the asimetry and kurtosis values. No matter the limitations we had, our results are similar to those found by foreign authors. Concepts as critical, physiologic and pathologic hypertrophy are discuss and also factors which influence upon the increase of the heart weight, as obesity, myocardial infiltrations and other changes proper to the old aged.