Profile of autopsy cases at tertiary care centre during pandemic

Abstract

The profile of autopsy cases are necessary for taking necessary preventive measures in future. New civil hospital is a government tertiary care center in south Gujarat where annually approximately 2500 cases are brought for postmortem examination. Forensic medicine department conducts postmortem examination of expert level cases which are directly brought by investigating officer or referred from medical officers. Manner of death is very important to determine the nature of investigation. The present study is a retrospective study. It includes all the total 131 expert autopsy cases conducted from 1 Jan 2020 to 31 Dec 2020. The emphasis was given on age, sex, cause of death, manner of death, mode of death, causative weapons. All these data were collected and analyzed. In the year 2020 total 131 expert cases out of them 89 male, 41 female and 1 unknown. Among them mode of death 26.72 % asphyxia, 20.61% coma, 33.59% syncope, 9.16% pending and 9.92% undetermined, 48.09% homicidal, 14.5% suicidal, 6.11% accidental, 12.98% natural death cases, 9.92% negative autopsy, 15.26% cases the time since death was within 12 hours. Present study evaluates the expert and referred autopsy cases conducted in a tertiary center, majority of the cases are of allegation and highly suspicious nature. So very few cases of road traffic accident and natural deaths or obvious suicidal death cases are brought to our department. So sometimes it becomes a challenging work to determine manner of the death, causative weapon and time since death.