Archive Information only
Workshop: Topics in Postmortem Toxicology – Case Studies and Beyond
Date: Sunday August 26, 2007
Chair:
Ann Gordon, Washington State Toxicology Laboratory, USA (ann.gordon@wsp.wa.gov)
Post-mortem forensic toxicology presents a number of challenges, many of which are outside of the control of the laboratory, such as conditions of the body and appropriate sample collection as well as analytical limitations and challenges within the laboratory, e.g., ability to identify and to quantify new drugs. In addition, we are regularly asked to interpret our results within the context of a specific case (including the decomposed cases or those with limited samples) and to interpret both newly emerging drug concentrations and drug-drug interactions.
This post-mortem workshop will review the components of a comprehensive drug screen for post-mortem cases, optimal sample collection methods including some specific approaches for how to best handle the less than optimal case. We will address some interpretative issues in post-mortem forensic toxicology including post-mortem redistribution and the value of analyzing multiple matrices, drug-drug and drug-alcohol interactions and as well as some recent trends in drug combination deaths. Case studies will be presented to highlight newer drugs or combination drug related deaths.
The workshop will include a discussion of the usefulness of alternative tissues, which tissues are likely to yield the most information for different kinds of drug investigations and the interpretation of the data obtained from these tissues. Beyond the individual case studies the workshop presenters will include a discussion of the availability of drug death databases for comparison to the analytical results obtained within your own lab, the usefulness and the limitations of interpreting drug concentrations from peripheral, central blood and tissues and how to relate the numbers generated in your laboratory with those published in the literature. Finally, we will explore the usefulness and limitations of death investigation drug databases in terms of epidemiological trends, and public health considerations.