Assessment of onset and progress in the high ambient environmental temperature influenced on rigor mortis in Tirunelveli district
Journal Title: Medpulse International Journal of Forensic Medicine - Year 2019, Vol 10, Issue 1
Abstract
Background: India is a country with vast diversity in population and climate. So, we cannot follow a single method or time pattern in calculating the time since death. This may be due to extremes of variation in temperature pattern in comparing the whole of India and the world. Estimating the Time Since Death is considered as one of the most difficult and inaccurate techniques in Forensic Pathology. Various evidence must be correlated to each other in order to arrive some sensible time limit, within which the death could have occurred. Aim:: This study was aimed to fix a time pattern for the rate of onset and progress of Rigor Mortis from examining individual joints that completed the progress of Rigor Mortis with reasonable evidences and to reveal the real-time taken for onset, progress, and completion of Rigor Mortis in Tirunelveli District, where high average ambient temperature was recorded. Materials and Methods: The study was conducted in 2015on 100 bodies of dead patients at Tirunelveli Medical College. All Medico-Legal and Non-Medical Legal cases, with a known time of death, only were selected for this study. The study was conducted in the veranda of the mortuary at that time. The dead bodies were not preserved in the cold storage during the entire study period. Height, built and nourishment, various premorbid conditions, time with the date of death and the environmental temperature on that day of the study were carefully recorded. Inch tapes were used for measuring height and nourishment. Results: In the age group of 41 to 50 years the Rigor Mortis completed early. Rigor Mortis took more time to complete than normal time in the age group of 11 to 20 years, because of lesser muscle mass. Moreover, irrespective of all the age group studied, the range of time taken for the completion of R. M was in between 3.3 hours to 6.45 hours. The time pattern in the earlier completion of R.M was in between 3.3 hours to 4.2 hours. But, in the late completion of R.M, the range of time pattern was in between 6.3 hours to 6.45 hours. The Mean time did not show any variations in the onset and progress of R.M. It was maintained in between 5.06 hrs to 5.34 hrs. On interpretation, the time shows 0.15 hr variation in between the age groups of 30 years to 60 years when comparing with the total variation of 0.5 hrs in the selected study. Conclusion: The role of onset and progress of R.M in estimating Time Since Death is a useful method. The MEAN time taken for the progress completion of Rigor Mortis is less than 6.00 hours. This time pattern was derived from 100 bodies studied. Cause of death varied, age pattern varied, sex pattern varied, but the annual ambient environmental temperature was high but constant with little variation, throughout the study period.
Authors and Affiliations
M Sivanandam, Parul C Patel
Keywords
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