Reading:: Detection of Antemortem Wounds on Dry Bones

The Detection of Microscopic Markers of Hemorrhaging and

Wound Age on Dry Bone: A Pilot Study

By Cristina Cattaneo, PhD, MD, Salvatore Andreola, MD, Eloisa Marinelli, MD, Pasquale Poppa, BSc, Davide Porta, BSc, and Marco Grandi, MD

It is easy for forensic pathologists to determine the survival time (time in between incident and death) of an injury largely by the color of the person’s skin—whether pink, reddish purple, blue, brown, yellow, etcetera. Each color represents a different stage of the healing process. This process ceases once the individual loses his/her life. For a short period of time, what you have left of the wound after death is a “snapshot” of the furthest stage of healing that was reached. For a forensic anthropologist working with dry bone versus fresh flesh, trying to make the same assumptions about injury survival time can be more labor-intensive. This is why the authors of this article conducted a pilot study of the evidences of trauma left on dry bone at varying survival interval rates. They used several cadavers to which the trauma survival time was known and conducted comparative analysis of the skeletal remains.

Methods

Fractured bones from 6 autopsies were collected from the Institute of Legal Medicine of Milano.

Case #	Bone Fractured	Survival Time
1	Rib	19 days
2	Tibia	34 minutes
3	Cranium	26 days
4	Cranium	16 days
5	Cranium	5 days
6	Rib	8.5 hours + negative control

A negative control fracture was created postmortem on the rib in case #6 to use for comparison. The bones were then artificially peutrified to remove all soft tissue. Next the specimens were viewed under a stereo microscope with special attention to the edges of the fractures to identify an periosteal (healing) reaction. The bones were then placed in 10% formalin and stained and decalcified. After decalcification, the bone was cut into 5mm blocks.

Results

Macroscopic review revealed that all but one of the bones showed no detectible macroscopic variation, which, anthropologically speaking means that the injuries would be ruled perimortem. Microscopic review, however, provided a great deal of more detail of the time of the injuries.

Case #	Survival Time	Microscopic Results
3	26 days	Blood clots suggestive of fibrin deposits
1	19 days	Foci of new bone formation
4	16 days	Blood clots suggestive of fibrin deposits
5	5 days	Deposition of fibrin
6	8.5 hours	Some deposition of fibrin
2	34 minutes	Slight blood clot

The results show the bones in different stages of healing corresponding to the survival time. This microscopic analysis supplied a great deal more information than the standard macroscopic procedure, which only ruled the fractures as ‘perimortem.’ So, histopathological research has proven by this study to be a worthy avenue to help forensic anthropologists determine traumatic survival time solely from dry bone. Such information can prove to have great forensic value in a death investigation. Of course, many more studies will need to be carried out experimenting with varying factors such as environment, individual healing rates, etcetera, before any scientific standards can be established. This is the very first study of its kind and it has opened the playing field for histopathological research on putrefied or macerated bone.

Source:

Cristina Cattaneo, PhD, MD, Salvatore Andreola, MD, Eloisa Marinelli, MD, 

        Pasquale Poppa, BSc, Davide Porta, BSc, and Marco Grandi, MD (2010), 

        The Detection of Microscopic Markers of Hemorrhaging and Wound Age 

        on Dry Bone: A Pilot Study, Am J Forensic Med Pathol • Volume 31, 

        Number 1.