TY - JOUR PY - 1997// TI - Determination of hepatitis markers in cadavers JO - Romanian journal of legal medicine A1 - Drugescu, N. A1 - Curca, C. A1 - Girbea, G. A1 - Constantinescu, A. SP - 128 EP - 136 VL - 5 IS - 2 N2 - Determination of hepatitis markers in cadavers. We have studied in 58 randomly selected cadavers the presence of various types of parenterally transmitted hepatitis viruses (B, C and D), our main objective being the evaluation of the professional risk associated with forensic autopsies. Each case have been tested for the presence of the following markers: AgHBs, AgHBe, anti-HBs, total anti-HBc, total anti-HCV and total anti-Delta. This set of tests, cover all the immunobiological variants of a vital hepatitis that can be relied upon in cadaver serum. As AgHBs positive was found in 22.41% of the cases (either recent infection or chronic carrier) and in 23.59% AgHBs was negative but AgHbc was positive (the 'anticore window effect' explains why the determination of only AgHBs do not estimate correctly the infectious risk), it results that 55% of all cases presented a serious risk of B hepatitis infection. D hepatitis was found in 1.72% as coinfection. An unexpected observation was that only 27% of suicides were virus hepatitis B or C free, although the number of cases is insufficient for statistic processing the authors believe that recent hepatic viral infections B or C might play a part in triggering the suicidal act. The differentiation between recent B viral infection and chronic carrier status cannot be made based only on postmortem serologic determination (dynamic determinations are impossible); it should associate microscopic investigation of the liver. Delta infection can be diagnosed in cadaver using anti-HBc IGM.

Language: romanian

LA - SN - 1221-8618 UR - http://dx.doi.org/ ID - ref1 ER -