Comparative Study On Forensic Documents Of 605 Cases Of Poisoning Death In Different Years

【Background】Poisoning deaths have been a most urgent issue in forensic pathology, and are equally important with deaths caused by mechanical injury, mechanical asphyxia, lightning stroke, hypothermia or hyperthermia, as well as sudden death. The task of poisoning cases leads to researches on character of poison, its species, cause of poisoning, mechanism, toxic dose, fatal dose, toxic blood level, blood level causing death, pathopoiesis, sampling, storing, delivering, poisoning and manner of death . In most of the literatures, there were often case reports, or further study on one single poison. But there are neither comparative retrospective researches, nor macroscopic predictive reviews. In recent years, many scholars collect the poisoning cases, classified them and compared transversally, which provide important evidence for determining the cause of death and for the case investigation. Some changes and improvement had shown up as the development of science and technique, especially in the field of pesticide production, traditional Chinese medical science, drug abuse and addiction. In order to provide theoretical basic for forensic practice and devote to poisoning prevention, this paper collected the poisoning cases of our department to describe the trend of case amounts, age distribution of decease and routes of intoxication retrospectively.【Objective】This research chose the poisoning cases from practice, analysized all the material with statistical methods, show the increasing of case amounts, age distribution of decease, routes of intoxication, and the constitution of poison type in each year retrospectively. The reasons for those features are also discussed to provide theoretical basic for forensic practice.【Materials and Methods】We took 216 poisoning cases from Department of Forensic Pathology, Falcuty of Forensic Science, Tongji Medical College, HUST, from January of 1999 to December of 2008 (named as group C shortly). Systemic autopsies and histopathologic examination are carried out in all the cases. Expect for the statistical analysis on the material mentioned above, we emphasized the features of poison species, route of intoxication and manner of poisoning. Comparative researches in our department are analysized including 158 poisoning cases from year 1983 to 1998 and 231 poisoning cases from 1957 to 1982.【Results】(1) The amounts of poisoning cases of each year had increased, but the constitute rates decreased; (2) Male were predominance, and were young adult mainly; (3) Cases by traditional pesticide had deceased while new type increased; (4)Two or more drugs combined poisoning increase significantly in the number for poison analysis should be the focus of attention, especially not a single element of poisoning lethal concentration, the possible consideration should be given two and two or more components of poisoning synergies.(5)Cases by Oral intoxication had decrease while those by respiratory pathway increased obviously.(6)Found in various types of forensic poisoning still a certain percentage of cases, so differents in different regions of the poisoning and death information for statistical analysis exist significancely the practice of guiding to a certain extent.【Conclusions】In our cases, the amount of poisoning cases had increased compared with those of previous years; there were new features in age distribution of decease and poison species and the iatrogenic cases by anesthetic poisoning had increased significantly.