Abstract:
Monitoring of the trends and patterns seen in judicial autopsies is critical for planning interventions in
the health sector. Statistical analyses about judicial post-mortems are not adequately performed to date.
Anyhow, if there are computerized mortuary registers, such statistical analysis will be an easy task.
This research enables the identification of pertinent demographic data, manner and cause of death,
inquest types and police jurisdictions in the postmortem examinations conducted in a tertiary care
hospital in Sri Lanka. A retrospective descriptive study was conducted over a 5-year period, from
January 2015 to December 2019. The data were analyzed with SPSS software and Microsoft Excel 365.
The p value, < .05 was set as significant in the chi-square test. Details of 4760 post-mortems were
analyzed in total. The autopsies had a male to female ratio of 3.7:1. The number of postmortems
performed varied by month, and no clear pattern was discernible. There was a nearly twofold increase
in autopsies performed on people aged 50 and under. There was no significant relationship between
the ability to provide the cause of death and sex. Significant associations were observed between age
and the ability to provide the cause of death, between the ability to provide the cause of death and the
type of inquest, and between the type of inquest and the manner of death. The ratio of magisterial
inquests to those conducted by the Inquirer into Sudden Deaths (ISDs) was 1:11.5. The ratio of natural
to unnatural to undetermined autopsies was 5:2:1. Mt Lavinia, Dehiwala, and Piliyandala were the
three police areas most heavily involved. It is emphasized in this study that combining findings with a
Geographic Information System in the context of geospatial technology can widely be used in the field
of Forensic medicine too.
