Depending on surgical approach and preoperative investigations, up to 20% of appendicectomies for acute appendicitis are negative.1 Therefore, all histopathologists are accustomed to signing out an appendix as normal on a regular basis. The question remains, however, whether there is any added value of obtaining extra sections of an apparently normal appendix in which the first section did not yield inflammation.

As in most histopathology laboratories, we usually take three sections from an appendix submitted for acute appendicitis, and these are then embedded in a single wax block resulting in a single H&E slide. In the majority of cases, acute inflammation is thus …