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Advances in forensic diagnosis of electric shock death in the absence of typical electrical marks

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Abstract

Electrical injury is a relatively uncommon but potentially devastating form of multi-system injury with high morbidity and mortality. In common electric injury cases, it is usually difficult to find characteristic changes of electric injury in major organs by using routine histopathological test methods unless there are landmark traces of electric injury, known as electric marks. How to determine electric shock death, especially in the absence of typical electrical marks on the body surface in some cases (which account for about two-thirds of electric injury cases), remains a challenging problem in forensic practice. Our summary shows that many current related studies have focused their efforts to find characteristic histopathological changes in major organs of the body caused by electric injury. Based on the results obtained through comparison of the literature, we find that it may be more urgent and important to find the optimal autopsy or sampling sites in cases with no typical electric marks, knowing that these sites may often reflect the most significant histopathological changes of electric injury, for instance anatomy and sampling of the anterior wrist and the medial malleolus in cases involving the hand-to-foot electric circuit pathway. In this article, we make a summary of advances in identification methods of electric injury, hoping that it could provide some new insights for further research in this field.

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Acknowledgements

The authors greatly appreciate the editors and two anonymous peer reviewers for their critical reading and insightful comments, which are helpful to improve our manuscript substantially.

Funding

This work was supported by the Opening Project of Key Laboratory of Evidence-Identification in Universities of Shandong, Shandong University of Political Science and Law, China (2018KFKT2 to Xu G) and the Major Transverse Research Projects of Jiaxing University, China (00619006 to Xu G).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Forensic and Pathology Laboratory, Judicial Expertise Center, Jiaxing University Medical College, Jiaxing, 314001, ZJ, China

    Xin Jin, Deqing Chen, Xiansi Zeng, Long Xu & Guangtao Xu

  2. Key Laboratory of Evidence Identification in Universities of Shandong Province, Shandong University of Political Science and Law, Jinan, 250014, SD, China

    Xuebo Li

  3. Department of Pathology and Key-Innovative Discipline Molecular Diagnostics, Jiaxing Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jiaxing University, Jiaxing, 314001, ZJ, China

    Bo Hu

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  1. Xin Jin
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  2. Deqing Chen
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Correspondence to Guangtao Xu.

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Jin, X., Chen, D., Li, X. et al. Advances in forensic diagnosis of electric shock death in the absence of typical electrical marks. Int J Legal Med 135, 2469–2478 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-021-02658-0

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