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. 2025 Aug 19.
doi: 10.1007/s00414-025-03576-1. Online ahead of print.

Exploring the post-mortem interval through blood biochemistry: a preliminary case series study and review of the literature

Vincenzo M Grassi  1   2 , Gabriele Ciasca  3   4 , Giuseppe Vetrugno  1   2 , Andrea Urbani  4   5 , Vincenzo L Pascali  2   4 , Fabio De-Giorgio  6   7
Affiliations

Exploring the post-mortem interval through blood biochemistry: a preliminary case series study and review of the literature

Vincenzo M Grassi et al. Int J Legal Med. .

Abstract

Post-mortem biochemistry can be included among the methods reported in the literature to investigate the time since death. To address this issue, we collected blood samples from hospitalized patients who died in the presence of health personnel. Samples were collected 20 min after death and every 6 h until 24 h post-mortem, with the last Ante Mortem (A.M.) sample also included in the analyses. Each sample was immediately centrifuged and analyzed. Our preliminary results indicate a significant and consistent increase in phosphokinase (CPK) and lactodehydrogenase (LDH) blood levels, with low interindividual variation among subjects. Interestingly, the measured time trend follows an exponential function, characterized by a time-dependent growth rate. While a larger sample size is needed to confirm our preliminary findings, our results suggest that CPK and LDH blood levels could be valuable parameters for determining the post-mortem interval. Furthermore, our data were systematically compared to those reported in the literature, which was carefully reviewed.

Keywords: Forensic pathology; Post-mortem biochemistry; Post-mortem interval; Time of death.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Ethics approval: The study was conducted in accordance with the principles of the Helsinki Declaration and was approved by the Institutional Research Ethics Committee of the Catholic University of Rome (ID 7312). Informed consent: Informed consent is not necessary in this work because it was a judicial autopsy case. Human and animal rights: This article does not contain any studies with animals. Conflict of interest: The authors declare no competing interests.

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