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This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) All Versions of this Article: 90/5/727    most recent expphysiol.2005.030551v1 Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Kaliszan, M. Articles by Penkowski, M. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Kaliszan, M. Articles by Penkowski, M. Related Collections Vascular

Micha Kaliszan¹, Roman Hauser¹, Roman Kaliszan², Pawe Wiczling², Janusz Buczyñski³ and Micha Penkowski⁴

¹ Department of Forensic Medicine² Department of Biopharmaceutics and Pharmacodynamics⁴ Department of Physics and Biophysics, Medical University of Gdañsk, Gdañsk, Poland ³ Department of Pig Breeding and Production, Agricultural University of Poznañ, Poznañ, Poland

The authors have conducted a systematic study in pigs to verify the models of post-mortem body temperature decrease currently employed in forensic medicine. Twenty-four hour automatic temperature recordings were performed in four body sites starting 1.25 h after pig killing in an industrial slaughterhouse under typical environmental conditions (19.5–22.5°C). The animals had been randomly selected under a regular manufacturing process. The temperature decrease time plots drawn starting 75 min after death for the eyeball, the orbit soft tissues, the rectum and muscle tissue were found to fit the single-exponential thermodynamic model originally proposed by H. Rainy in 1868. In view of the actual intersubject variability, the addition of a second exponential term to the model was demonstrated to be statistically insignificant. Therefore, the two-exponential model for death time estimation frequently recommended in the forensic medicine literature, even if theoretically substantiated for individual test cases, provides no advantage as regards the reliability of estimation in an actual case. The improvement of the precision of time of death estimation by the reconstruction of an individual curve on the basis of two dead body temperature measurements taken 1 h apart or taken continuously for a longer time (about 4 h), has also been proved incorrect. It was demonstrated that the reported increase of precision of time of death estimation due to use of a multiexponential model, with individual exponential terms to account for the cooling rate of the specific body sites separately, is artifactual. The results of this study support the use of the eyeball and/or the orbit soft tissues as temperature measuring sites at times shortly after death. A single-exponential model applied to the eyeball cooling has been shown to provide a very precise estimation of the time of death up to approximately 13 h after death. For the period thereafter, a better estimation of the time of death is obtained from temperature data collected from the muscles or the rectum.

(Received 24 March 2005; accepted after revision 2 June 2005; first published online 8 June 2005)
Corresponding author R. Hauser: Department of Forensic Medicine, Medical University of Gdask, ul. Debowa 23, 80-204, Gdask, Poland. Email: rohauser{at}amg.gda.pl