H & E

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H & E

Last updated on Saturday, April 4 2009 by jdmiles

H&E is short for "Hematoxylin and Eosin." The H&E staining method is the most commonly used stain in neuropathology. It is a simple stain, and provides an excellent first look at the tissue of interest.

Hematoxylin as a basic dye, and has an affinity for basophilic structures. It stains these structures with a bluis-purple color. Basophilic structures include the cell nucleus and ribosomes.

Eosin is a pink acidic dye. Cytoplasm and protein tend to be eosinophilic.

Related images:

H&E - Normal Example
Normal neuropil, stained with H&E. One of the most frustrating aspects for those first approaching neuropathology is the absence of cytoplasmic differentiation in most of the cells within the brain leading to what appears to be islands of nuclei floating in an ocean of neuropil.

H&E - Example of pathological findings
This is an H&E stain of skeletal muscle from a patient with an inflammatory myopathy. Note that you can clearly see the muscle fibers (pink) and the inflammatory cells (small round blue/purple things in between the muscle fibers). H&E is enough to tell us...

H&E Stain of a Pilocytic Astrocytoma
Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) is the most commonly used stain in neuropathology. Although many diagnoses require special stains, there are features that show up on H&E which can guide the decision to make subsequent stains. Often, there are features of a disease...

Normal skeletal muscle, H&E stained frozen section x 100
Well frozen muscle demonstrates in vivo structure much more reliably then does formalin fixed tissue, and is therefore used in the analysis of primary muscular pathology. Poorly frozen muscle may be uninterpretable due to marked ice crystal artifact.

Normal skeletal muscle, H&E stained section of paraffin embedded tissue x 100
Formalin Fixed, paraffin-embedded skeletal muscle is used primarily in the analysis of epimysial and perimysial pathology (inflammation, fibrosis). Regenerating muscle fibers are also easily seen within the formalin fixed paraffin-embedded sections.