Postmortem Cytokine Levels and the Cause of Death

Postmortem Cytokine Levels and the Cause of Death

SOHTARO MIMASAKA^1,2

¹Department of Public Health and Forensic Medicine, Division of Forensic Medicine,
Tohoku University School of Medicine, Sendai 980-8575, and
²Department of Forensic Medicine and Science, The University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK

We investigated the usefulness of cytokine measurement in the field of forensic medicine. In this study, the levels of Interleukin (IL)-1b, IL-6, IL-8, IL-10 in serum collected within 2 days after death were used to estimate the cause of death. In seventy-one victims, mean age 55.5±17.7 (S.D.) years, the cases were classified as traumatic death (24 cases, trauma group), unnatural deaths by other than traumatic causes (31 cases, unnatural death group), and deaths due to natural causes (16 cases, natural death group). The Kruskal-Wallis test showed that IL-6 and IL-8 were good indices of trauma. According to the Scheffé test, IL-6 and IL-8 levels of the traumatic death group were significantly higher than those of the unnatural death group (p<0.05), but there was no significant difference in IL-6 levels between the traumatic death and natural death groups. Further, IL-6 levels showed considerable variability even among similar cases. However, IL-8 measurement of postmortem samples is useful to evaluate non-quantitative damage received before death.

Keywords —— autopsy case; cause of death; cytokine; forensic medicine; trauma

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Tohoku J. Exp. Med., 2002, 197, 145-150

Address for reprints: Sohtaro Mimasaka, Department of Public Health and Forensic Medicine, Division of Forensic Medicine, Tohoku University School of Medicine, 2-1 Seiryomachi, Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-8575, Japan.

e-mail: mimasaka@forensic.med.tohoku.ac.jp