Lateral hemostatic sutures in cold knife conization of the cervix. What do they accomplish?

Objective: The purpose of cold knife conization is to ligate the descending cervical branch of the uterine artery and thus to decrease bleeding. The aim of this study was to investigate the actual frequency of ligation.
Study Design: Two lateral sutures were placed in the cervix at the 3 and 9 o'clock positions in 97 patients (194 sutures) as part of vaginal hysterectomy. The position of each suture was determined during evaluation of the surgical specimen.
Results: Because the specimens from 10 patients contained only single sutures, only 184 sutures were actually evaluated. Upon microscopic examination, 50 of the 184 (27%) appeared to contain no artery. Of the remaining 134 sutures, 95 (71%) enclosed an artery, and 9 (7%) lay within a 10 x field of a branch. Only 30 sutures (22%) missed the artery entirely. Thus, in the 73% of cases where an artery of significant size could be identified, the artery lay within a lateral stitch 71% of the time.
Conclusion: If the descending cervical branch of the uterine artery supplies most of the blood to the cervix, advance placement of lateral sutures would be expected to reduce blood loss during conization.