2017 Volume 66 Issue 1 Pages 8-16
The formaldehyde concentration in the air of a working environment must be strictly kept low, and the working room in medical facilities should be equipped with an appropriate ventilation system. On the other hand, organs removed from autopsied corpses are usually fixed and often stored for a long time in a large volume of formaldehyde solution (FA method). After the fixation, it usually takes more than one hour to wash out the formaldehyde from the fixed organs when preparing the blocks of tissues for histological examination. When the washing-out of formaldehyde is inadequate, the exposure of pathologists and medical technologists to formaldehyde will be serious. We developed an alternative method of organ storage in 2-propanol solution after the initial formaldehyde fixation (AL method), and the usefulness of this method was studied. We found that the AL method significantly reduced the formaldehyde concentration in the air in the autopsy room while preserving the quality of morphological structures for hematoxylin and eosin staining, which was comparable to that of the FA method. Some antigens for immunohistochemistry were better preserved by the AL method than by the FA method. In addition, the AL method preserved the nucleic acid quality better than the FA method. We conclude that the 2-propanol storage method for resected organs (AL method) may be useful.
