Medical Autopsy for Sudden Unexplained Death in Saudi Arabia: A Call to Action

Abstract

Sudden unexplained death (SUD) is a sudden, unexpected, and unexplained death in an individual older than 1 year. It is one of the most devastating and tragic events to families and the community at large, particularly when it happens at a young age. Finding the cause of SUD is extremely important in order to prevent its recurrence in the family, and to help understand the epidemiology of SUD in the community. It has been well-established that the most effective way of finding the cause of SUD is by performing a medical autopsy. In many countries, medical autopsy is mandated in SUD cases. In others, however, medical autopsy is rarely performed for the purpose of identifying the cause of SUD, which is the case in Saudi Arabia. In this review, we discussed the importance of finding the cause of death in SUD cases, the role of different types of medical autopsies, and the state of medical autopsy in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, we proposed a clinical pathway to incorporate medical autopsy in the care of SUD cases, and to connect family members to the health care system in order to perform cascade screening.

Keywords: Autopsy; Review article; Saudi Arabia; Sudden cardiac death; Sudden unexplained death.

Fig. 1

Proposed pathway for medical autopsy: SUD: sudden unexplained death. * SUD criteria: 1-Death occurring within an hour of onset of symptoms, or in patients found dead within 24h of being asymptomatic, 2-Unexplained by previous SCD-predisposing condition, toxin, homicide, or suicide. ** Inherited arrhythmia clinics are multidisciplinary clinics with a team including an electrophysiologist, medical geneticist, genetic counsellor, and a pathologist.