Abstract
Postmortem diagnosis of cantharidin-induced myocardial injury and postmortem interval estimation (PMI) are the challenges in forensic science. Cardiac biomarkers play an important role in the prediction and diagnosis of myocardial injury and can be used to determine the PMI. Based on the evidence, we aimed to explore the biomarkers which may be used for the postmortem diagnosis of cantharidin-induced myocardial injury and PMI estimation using the study of the proteins expression of TN-T, VEGF and HIF-1α by ELISA. Results of this study suggested that postmortem pathological changes were difficult to identify due to the autolysis of myocardium 72 h after death in cantharidin poisoning group. The plasma levels of TN-T and HIF-1α/TN-T are cardiac biomarkers with higher diagnostic accuracy for postmortem diagnosis of cantharidin-induced myocardial injury, VEGF/HIF-1α promises to be a biomarker for PMI estimation. Further studies are needed to verify these biomarkers, based on population, for being a useful tool in postmortem diagnosis of cantharidin-induced myocardial injury and PMI estimation.
Highlights
Troponin T (TN-T) is the major biomarker in the clinical diagnosis of acute myocardial injury[12], the use of TN-T in the postmortem diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction and sudden cardiac death have been proved by some previous studies[13,14]
We found that the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and hypoxia inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) were related to the ischemic and hypoxic changes in myocardium
Previous studies showed that hypoxia is a stimulator for VEGF expression and HIF-1α is a major regulator for oxygen homeostasis[20,21]; What is important, HIF-1α pathway and VEGF pathway are the important mechanisms during the hypoxia or ischemia have been proved by previous studies[22,23]
Summary
Troponin T (TN-T) is the major biomarker in the clinical diagnosis of acute myocardial injury[12], the use of TN-T in the postmortem diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction and sudden cardiac death have been proved by some previous studies[13,14]. We found that the expression of VEGF and HIF-1α were positively related with TN-T and myocardial demage area in our previous study[24] Based on these evidences, we aim to evaluate the role of TN-T, VEGF and HIF-1α in postmortem diagnosis of cantharidin-induced myocardial injury and PMI estimation in this study. To explore the biomarkers of myocardial injury in rats after cantharidin poisoning, we observed the postmortem pathological changes of rat hearts and detected the expression of TN-T, VEGF and HIF-1α in rat serum at different postmortem intervals, followed by analyzing the postmortem diagnostic adequacy of TN-T, VEGF and HIF-1α and the relationship between biomarkers and postmortem interval in our present study
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