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Medical examiners routinely check the conjunctivae and eyelids for pinpoint-sized petechial hemorrhages. Other helpful indicators are remarkably simple things, like noticing on which day the newspapers or mail started piling up.Ĭause of death. The ideal method to determine time of death is not an autopsy finding, Dr. Even so, the best estimate of time of death has a margin of error not of minutes but of hours or even days.
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These methods are used along with other physical findings such as rigor mortis (stiffening of the body), livor mortis (gravitational settling of the blood), algor mortis (cooling of body temperature) and decomposition of the body. Thus, a pathologist can sample the potassium level in the vitreous humor and use that value to calculate an approximate time of death, Dr. Its also a process thats unaffected by temperature. In the eye, this process happens more slowly and at a more predictable rate than in the blood. After death, blood cells in the body break down and release potassium. The second way the eye can help determine the postmortem interval is through the measurement of potassium levels in the vitreous humor. (See A New Look at a Dead Retina, on page 80.) But this clouding may provide a rough estimate in helping to determine time of death. This obstructs the view of the lens and back of the eye. About two hours after death, the cornea becomes hazy or cloudy, turning progressively more opaque over the next day or two. But there are two ways that the eye can provide a ballpark estimate of the postmortem interval. Determining the postmortem interval (i.e., time elapsed since death) is nowhere near as exact in real life as it is on television shows, Dr. What follows are specific ways that the eye is used in the postmortem exam, according to Randy Hanzlick, M.D., chief medical examiner for Fulton County, Georgia, and professor of forensic pathology at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta. In an autopsy, the eye can provide unique forensic information, as well as contribute and confirm other physical evidence. The word autopsy is Latin for seeing with ones own eyes.