Abstract
In order to have adequate controls for further experimental studies upon cardiac hypertrophy we have considered it necessary to accumulate data from a large series of normal rabbits and to treat this data by statistical methods. Many previous investigators have published average heart weight body weight ratios for small series of rabbits, but there are no figures for the ratio of the left to the right ventricular weights. Hasenfeld and Romberg 1 in a control series of 32 normal rabbits found an average of 2.38 gm. of heart muscle per kilo of body weight. Joseph 2 in a series of 38 male and 66 female rabbits found an average ratio of 2.67 in the males with a maximum of 3.42 and a minimum of 2.07, while for the females the average ratio was 2.70 with a maximum of 4.47 and a minimum of 2.0 gm. of heart per kilo body weight. Wassermeyer and Rohrbach 3 quote Kuelb's average figure on a small series of normal domestic rabbits at 2.70 and Hesse's average figure of 2.70 on a similar series and their own figures on 10 rabbits with a maximum of 2.73 and a minimum of 2.03 and an average of 2.38 gm. of heart per kilo of body weight. Sekiguchi 4 used as control his average of 2.04 gm. of heart per kilo of body weight obtained from the study of 10 normal rabbits.
In a series of 168 normal rabbits of Chinchilla, New Zealand, Red, White and Dutch Black strains and mixtures of these, with body weights varying from 900 to 3,000 gm. we have found the arithmetical mean of the HW/BW to be 1.972 gm. heart per kilo body weight, with a standard deviation of 0.299 and a probable error of ±0.015 for the mean and ±0.011 for the standard deviation.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.