Vitality and wound-age estimation in forensic pathology: review and future prospects

Abstract

Determining the age of a wound is challenging in forensic pathology, but it can contribute to the reconstruction of crime scenes and lead to arrest of suspects. Forensic scholars have tended to focus on evaluating wound vitality and determining the time elapsed since the wound was sustained. Recent progress in forensic techniques, particularly high-throughput analyses, has enabled evaluation of materials at the cellular and molecular levels, as well as simultaneous assessment of multiple markers. This paper provides an update on wound-age estimation in forensic pathology, summarizes the recent literature, and considers useful additional information provided by each marker. Finally, the future prospects for estimating wound age in forensic practise are discussed with the hope of providing something useful for further study.

Keywords: Forensic sciences; estimation; forensic pathology; vitality; wound age.

Table 1.

Reactivity of age biomarkers in relation to the time after skin and skeletal muscle injury. Coloured areas showed significant differences between the control and injured groups, markers in different studies appear in different colours.