Magnesium, potassium, sodium and calcium in post-mortem vitreous humour from humans

Evaluation of postmortem serum calcium and magnesium levels in relation to the causes of death in forensic autopsy

“…This was similar to clinical findings in saltwater near-drowning cases [25,26]. A significant elevation in the left cardiac levels of both markers compared with those in the other sites suggested the influence of saltwater aspiration [27][28][29][30]. Although an elevated serum Ca level was also observed in fire fatalities and freshwater drowning, these groups showed a higher level in the peripheral blood, suggesting an increase of skeletal muscle origin.…”

Postmortem diagnosis of hypertonic dehydration

“…Although according to Coe's original data [4] there seems to be a strong correlation between antemortem serum values to postmortem vitreous values for sodium and urea, other authors [3] only found a poor correlation of antemortem serum with postmortem vitreous concentrations (correlation coefficient for sodium 0.59, for chloride 0.43). Therefore, mainly in the American literature [7][8][9][10][11]31] recommended dysregulation patterns and reference values have to be considered with care because the reference values are very narrow (Table 4); other authors found wider ranges for the different analytes [3,14,17,26,32,39,41]. Furthermore, they are not suitable as discriminating values between normal, pathologic and lethal states, because investigations on collectives with dysregulations are missing.…”

Postmortem biochemistry

“…Swift et al [37], Blumenfeld et al [2], Wilkie, Bellamy [38] and several others [3,4,9,11,17,19,25,29,34]. These investigations were carried out on differing reference samples regarding age, sex, cause of death, postmortem interval, previous health status, antemortem serum values.…”