Obscure Death And Bronchial Asthma.

Abstract

Obscure death (OD) is a medico-legal dilemma; and it had not been well covered in the literature. It could be real OD if no cause was achieved after having all relevant data and conducting a complete standard autopsy followed by a series of complementary investigations. Or it could be relative OD if one or more of those important procedures or investigations were not performed, whatever were the circumstances. We had studied retrospectively, in detail, most of the parameters and variables related to obscure death cases in our institute for the period 01.01.1981-31.12.1992 inclusive, to find any correlation or association or not. And coup1ed with revision of the relevant literature, we had then discussed our results. Within that period studied, out of a total of 1445 autopsies (average autopsy rate was 120 autopsy per year), there were 106 cases of obscure death. Average OD rate in our institute was 7.34 % In fact, average OD rate is always below 10% (2.4% real. 7.34% relative). From our obscure death cases (N=106) we shall present two cases, where the difficulty to certify the cause of death as bronchial asthma is there. Often the forensic pathologist, if objective and unbiased, will label such cases as obscure death cases.