Postmortem vitreous chemistry – An evaluation of sodium, potassium and chloride levels in estimation of time since death (during the first 36 h after death)

Vitreous Humor: A Short Review on Post-mortem Applications

“…Body fluids like VH show post-mortem alterations in the levels of their electrolytes [20]. The degree of change in vitreous electrolytes is dependent on conditions such as the storage condition of the body, the PMI, and the method of sampling the body fluid [26,27].…”

“…Since then, vitreous potassium has been the most extensively studied parameter for estimation of time since death [20]. Potassium diffuses post-mortem from the retina and, to a lesser extent, the lens into the VH.…”

“…There has been extensive debate on the utility of vitreous potassium as a predictor of PMI [20,31,32]. For instance, one study found only a slight change in vitreous potassium levels and time since death, but this change was not significant [20].…”

“…VH is relatively inert and only slightly influenced by sudden fluctuations in the blood chemistry [9]. The isolate nature of VH, compared to blood and Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF), and its resistance to microbiological contamination with bacterial degradation [5,6,11,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] makes VH a very suitable medium for post-mortem biochemical investigation [13][14][15][16][17]. Moreover, its composition is more stable and less affected by post-mortem changes than CSF [14,21,22] or blood [5,6,10,14,21,22].…”

“…Determination of PMI is essential in many criminal forensic investigations as well as in certain natural deaths [9,24]. Though the exact time of death can rarely be estimated on the basis of autopsy findings alone, an appropriate range of PMI can be deduced by careful interpretation of various changes that take place after death [20].…”