Pathological Analysis

On postoperative day 14, the mice received a fatal dose of furan gas, and an autopsy was performed to grossly assess the extent of the adhesions. The adhesions were grossly assessed by the surgeon according to the modified Nair’s macroscopic adhesion classification: grade 0, no adhesions; grade 1, a single adhesive band between organs or organs and abdominal wall; grade 2, two adhesive bands between organs or organs and abdominal wall; grade 3, more than two adhesive bands between organs and abdominal wall, or adhesion to intestinal loops without adhesions to abdominal wall; and grade 4, thick and complex adhesive band between organs or organ and abdominal wall or direct adhesion of viscera to abdominal wall. The results are shown in Table ​Table11.

Gross adhesion results.

If adhesions were present, an adhesion sample was sent for pathology studies. One pathologist (IK), blinded to the group of specimen, read all the Hematoxylin & Eosin (H&E)-stained histological slides using an Olympus BX40 microscope at a magnitude of 100×. The sample slides were fixated in formalin and assessed for fibrosis, angiogenesis, and inflammation levels, according to the scores shown in Table ​Table2.2. The inflammation was graded as: no inflammation, scattered infiltrates, or continuous infiltrates; the fibrosis as: no fibrosis, patchy scattered bands, or dense bands; and the angiogenesis as: no vascular proliferation, patchy vascular proliferation, and dense vascular proliferation.

Adhesion sample pathological grading criteria.

Data were entered to the PASW (SPSS version 18.0). A p-value <0.05 was considered statistically significant. Statistical analysis was done using ANOVA (analysis of variance) for comparing multiple variables. For post hoc analysis, two-sample t-test was used to determine the difference between the groups.