Evaluation of alcohol concentrations in samples referred to the forensic Laboratory in Baghdad

Abstract

Background: Detection of alcohol in postmortem blood and body fluids is of extreme importance in medico-legal investigation as it may affect and change the decision of the court in legal hearing. It can be a cause death or sharing a role in different modes of death. Objectives: To evaluate the problem of alcohol intake in general and its relation to age,sex and its contribution in different causes of death. Method: A prospective study within 6 month period on postmortem blood samples referred to the lab. For detection and measurement of alcohol. Five to 10 ml of blood of each sample was tested using Head Space GC with flame ionization detector (FID) from Agilent 7890A. Result: In general traumatic death was predominant among all victims.From total 1275, only 112 (8.8%) sample were positive. Males were more than 5 times than females. There was a significant relation of alcohol intake with traumatic causes of death, yet only in 13 victims the concentration was fatal. Conclusion: Alcohol drinking is a minor problem as it was detected in a small group of all cases yet its association with traumatic death was significantly higher than natural death and its consumption was more than 5 times in males. Only in limited number of cases the concentration was fatal.

Alcohol among young people in Iraq: a systematic scoping review

“…Descriptions of the studies are reported in Table 2. Of the included studies, only four were alcohol specific [17][18][19][20]; two were about substance use [21,22] and two about health risk behaviours [23,24]; one each was primarily focused on mental health disorders [25], smoking [26], novel psychoactive drugs [27], risky driving [28], and sleep disorders [29]. No literature was found that related to preventative strategies in relation to alcohol.…”

“…Only one study recruited a sample from more than one province [25]. Four studies recruited from Baghdad [19][20][21]27] and Erbil [17,22,23,28]. Two recruited students from Karbala [18,26].…”

“…Nine studies were self-administered surveys [17-19, 23, 24, 26-29]eight of these were paper-and-pen and one online [27]. Three studies used face-to-face interviews [21,22,25] and one used autopsy blood samples [20]. Eight studies were conducted in school or college [17-19, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29], two at home [22,25], one each at a youth centre [21], online [27] and at a forensics laboratory [20].…”

“…Two used the Composite International Diagnostic Interview [21,25,30], one used the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) [18,31], and one the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) [22,32]. One study utilised blood alcohol concentration at autopsy [20]. The other studies did not report how alcohol questions were asked.…”

“…Similarly, Al-Ameri, Abd Al-Badri, Lafta [19] defined medical students as those studying medicine, dentistry or pharmacy. Of the other three studies, one was a general household sample [25], one a youth centre sample [21] and the third a sample of general autopsies [20].…”