The ingestion of extraneous substances is quite common in clinical practice; it usually befalls in the pediatric age, mostly between 6 months and 6 years. In most cases, complications do not emerge, and the prognosis is considered favorable. However, when a case of battery ingestion occurs, serious adverse events may develop. The ingestion of these components is a potential life-threatening event for children.In this article, we report the case of an 18-month-old child who died from hemorrhagic shock due to an aortoesophageal fistula caused by a 20 mm lithium button battery lodged in the esophagus.The child presented vomiting blood, and laboratory results revealed a severe anemization, which later led to death.The autopsy showed a coin battery located in the middle third of the esophagus as well as a transmural erosion of the esophageal wall with fistulization into the aortic wall. The histological examination revealed a severe necrosis of the esophageal and aortic walls in line with the junction between the aortic arch and the descending part.

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is one of the most frequent myeloid malignancies. In patients with the disease, death often occurs due to complications of marrow failure, such as sepsis or significant hemorrhage. Rarely, undiagnosed and rapid evolving cases may present with fatal multi-organ failure. The authors report a case of sudden death in a 67-year-old woman who had been in apparent good health. A thorough post-mortem investigation performed on the decedent led to the diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia subtype M5. Autopsy and histopathologic findings allowed us to determine AML complicated by multiple organ failure as the cause of the death. The case report suggests that underlying acute myeloid leukemia should be included in the differential diagnosis of sudden death with multisystem organ failure, however rare. Actually, it represents a quite unusual cause of sudden death, rarely reported in the medicolegal literature. A complete forensic approach by means of autopsy, histological and immunohistochemical analyses is deemed essential in order to correctly determine both the cause and the mode of death.