Postmortem Cytokine Levels and the Cause of Death

抄録

We investigated the usefulness of cytokine measurement in the field of forensic medicine. In this study, the levels of Interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-6, IL-8, IL-10 in serum collected within 2 days after death were used to estimate the cause of death. In seventy-one victims, mean age 55.5±17.7 (S.D.) years, the cases were classified as traumatic death (24 cases, trauma group), unnatural deaths by other than traumatic causes (31 cases, unnatural death group), and deaths due to natural causes (16 cases, natural death group). The Kruskal-Wallis test showed that IL-6 and IL-8 were good indices of trauma. According to the Scheffé test, IL-6 and IL-8 levels of the traumatic death group were significantly higher than those of the unnatural death group (p<0.05), but there was no significant difference in IL-6 levels between the traumatic death and natural death groups. Further, IL-6 levels showed considerable variability even among similar cases. However, IL-8 measurement of postmortem samples is useful to evaluate non-quantitative damage received before death.