Iraqi Journal of Veterinary Sciences

Abstract

The hair density of the native skin cattle was calculated by counting hair follicles from the Hematoxylin and Eosin stained horizontal sections taken from skin samples which were fixed in either formalin buffered solution or alcoholic Bouin's solution and processed by the routine paraffin embedding method. The hair density of the formalin fixed samples was counted to be 13.68 ± 2/mm2 while the hair density of the Boins fixed skin samples was found to be 14.12 ± 5/mm2.
The surface area of skin samples showed variable skin shrinkage percentage during the different stages of histological procedure. The shrinkage percentage was especially obvious in paraffin infiltration. The final shrinkage percentage of the surface area of formalin and alcoholic Bouin's fixed samples was 13.94 % and 15.03 % successively. The increased shrinkage percentage of the samples fixed in alcoholic Bouin's fixed compared to that of the formalin fixed samples lead to a false increase in the hair density of Bouins fixed samples compared to formalin fixed samples. Therefore the increase in the hair density is directly proportional to an increase in shrinkage percentage, and this reflects on the values of the correcting factor which becomes 0.67 for the Bouin's fixed samples and 0.69 for the formalin fixed samples. Thus we reached to a conclusion that the shrinkage percentage is inversely proportional with value of the correcting factor. Taking the correcting factor in consideration, the high false hair density of the stained skin sections is corrected to become 9.44/mm2 only in the back region of the living native cow.