Introduction: Cardiac myxomas are the most frequent heart tumors that surgeons of the „Prof. Dr. C.C. Ilies-cu” Institute have removed over the past two decades.
Methods: From a macroscopical point of view, the tumors ranged from 0.8/0.7/0.4 cm to 11/5/5. They were polypoid, ovoid or spherical. The colour was non homogeneous. Some of them were incapsulated (16), others were not (32), while still others were partially in-capsulated. HE, VGE, PAS-Alcian staining was perfor-med and on some occasions an IHC too, for Calretinin, S100, NSE, CD34, vimentin.
From a microscopical point of view, the presence of diagnosis criteria was the general rule, that was taken into account, the number of cases showing a (generally recent) superadded blood clot was around 15 percent. In 20 percent of the cases, an IHC was also performed: 75 percent of the cases were Calretinin positive, 60 to 80 percent of cases were S1000 positive, 50 percent NSE positive, 65 percent CD 34 positive and 50 percent vi-mentin positive.
Conclusions: A myxoma diagnosis is based on the identification of lepidic cells in background prolifera-tions within the myxomas. The myxoma (lepidic) cells are generally reactive to anti- Calretinin, S100, NSE, CD34 and vimentin antibodies.