chicken fat clot 

Gross appearance of chicken fat clot

PATHOLOGY 

A slowly formed fibrin-like substance, which may be found in the heart and large blood vessels in some autopsy cases. Chicken fat clots are yellow, rubbery, don’t adhere to vessel walls.

Chicken fat clot types

• Wavelike fibrin fibres–associated with short survival (< 3 hours) after poisoning, burns, asphyxia, intracerebral haemorrhage

• Short fibrin fibres–found in cases that survived > 1 day after malignant neoplasms and acute or chronic inflammatory diseases, etc.

• Short fibrin fibres–mixed with wavelike fibrin fibres–found in cases that died of inflammatory diseases, chronic heart failure, haemorrhagic shock, drowning, etc, two-thirds of whom survived > 1 day

Morphological analysis of chicken fat blood clots may be of used as a crude index of the survival interval of some acute and most chronic medico-legal deaths.

Synonym Chicken fat blood clot 

Reference Legal Medicine Volume 10, Issue 3, May 2008, Pages 138–142http://dx.

doi.org/10.1016/j.legalmed.2007.11.004