To reveal "arrhythmia death" in forensic autopsy ; the collaboration between pathological investigations and gene analysis.

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25670345
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Legal medicine
• Research Institution: Tokyo Women's Medical University
• Principal Investigator: RO Ayako 東京女子医科大学, 医学部, 講師 (50296555)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): MIZUKAMI Hajime 東京医科大学, 医学部, 准教授 (50384938)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 心臓刺激伝導系 / 突然死 / 法医病理学 / 遺伝子解析 / 致死性不整脈

Outline of Final Research Achievements

We investigated serial histological sections of the cardiac conducting systems in 123 forensic autopsy cases. The sinus nodes observed in parallel with the conducting fibers revealed a negative correlation between the density of the conducting fibers and the patients’ ages. The pathological lesions in the atrioventricular node were detected in 25％ of the group of sudden death of unknown etiology and in 18％ of the group of non-cardiac death. The whole exon analyses of 13 genes which were thought to be related to the diseases with fatal arrhythmia found that 4 gene mutations were detected among 7 cases. However the detected mutation were found both in the group of cardiac death and in the group of non-cardiac death.
These results indicated that both pathological investigations and gene analysis were not sufficient for confirming the diagnosis of fatal arrhythmia and that the measured judgments were required for the forensic diagnosis of the sudden death cases as arrhythmia death.

Free Research Field

法医病理学