Citation

Fiorentin TR, Logan BK. J. Forensic Leg. Med. 2020; 71: 101942.

Affiliation

The Center for Forensic Science Research and Education, USA; NMS Labs, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.jflm.2020.101942

PMID

32342900

Abstract

The authors regretfully disclose an error in transposition of blood and urine GHB concentrations in a figure, and in the discussion of those results. Fig. 4 shows the distribution of GHB concentrations (mg/L) in 59 DFSA cases and the vertical axis in this figure should be the opposite. Four cases are above the limit of 10 mg/L for urine and 3 cases are above the limit of 5 mg/L for blood. The corrected figure is freely available by following the DOI.

The following paragraph in the discussion section is corrected with reference to the corrected figure (above): “Current guidance for distinguishing between exogenous and endogenous GHB suggest cut-offs of between 5 and 10 mg/L for antemortem urine 45−49 and between 4 and 5 mg/L for ante-mortem blood.45,46,48,49 The analytical cut-off in the cases we evaluated was 2 mg/L in blood and 2 mg/L in urine. A total of 59 cases (5.9%) were positive above the analytical reporting limits, however only 7 cases (0.7%) were positive above the recommended thresholds (i.e. 10 mg/L in urine and 5 mg/L in blood) for distinguishing exogenous ingestion. Previous publications have reported GHB prevalence of 5.0% or less in DFSA cases.17,20,21,26,29 In our cases GHB was detected at concentrations of 10 mg/L or above in urine in 4 cases (0.4%), and 5.0 mg/L or above in blood in 3 cases (0.3%). Other authors have suggested the use of creatinine-corrected GHB concentrations in evaluating urine GHB concentrations50; however that testing was not performed in these cases. The blood and urine distribution of GHB concentrations in these cases is shown in Fig. 4.”

Language: en