Is old stuff back? A fatal case of ethyl chloride sniffing

Background: Ethyl chloride (EC) or chloroethane is a colourless halogenated hydrocarbon gas regularly employed as a topical anaesthetic spray for pain-related injuries and muscle spasm in athletes. However, EC became also popular as a street drug in the 1980s. Brief inhalations of EC vapour can result in dizziness, euphoria, confusion, incoordination, hallucinosis, impairment of short-term memory and narcosis. Inhalation of higher doses, usually employed to \u201cget high\u201d, may be related to severe depression of the central nervous system. Indeed, toxicity and deaths have been reported so far. Case presentation: A 40-year-old man was found unresponsive after EC inhalation. EC determination was performed by dynamic headspace gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry. EC was detected in the peripheral blood (0.156 g/L), central blood concentration (0.203 g/L) and the lung and brain (19 and 25 mg/kg). EC in the vitreous humour showed a sensitively lower respect to blood (0.018 vs 0.203 g/L). Conclusions: Considering the results of toxicological analyses of investigations on the death scene besides the absence of any signs of trauma, death was attributed to inhalation of ethyl chloride

Forensic applications of micro-computed tomography: a systematic review

Purpose: The aim of this systematic review was to provide a comprehensive overview of micro-CT current applications in forensic pathology, anthropology, odontology, and neonatology. Methods: A bibliographic research on the electronic databases Pubmed and Scopus was conducted in the time frame 01/01/2001–31/12/2021 without any language restrictions and applying the following free-text search strategy: “(micro-computed tomography OR micro-CT) AND (forensic OR legal)”. The following inclusion criteria were used: (A) English language; (B) Application of micro-CT to biological and/or non-biological materials to address at least one forensic issue (e.g., age estimation, identification of post-mortem interval). The papers selected by three independent investigators have been then classified according to the investigated materials. Results: The bibliographic search provided 651 records, duplicates excluded. After screening for title and/or abstracts, according to criteria A and B, 157 full-text papers were evaluated for eligibility. Ninety-three papers, mostly (64) published between 2017 and 2021, were included; considering that two papers investigated several materials, an overall amount of 99 classifiable items was counted when referring to the materials investigated. It emerged that bones and cartilages (54.55%), followed by teeth (13.13%), were the most frequently analyzed materials. Moreover, micro-CT allowed the collection of structural, qualitative and/or quantitative information also for soft tissues, fetuses, insects, and foreign materials. Conclusion: Forensic applications of micro-CT progressively increased in the last 5 years with very promising results. According to this evidence, we might expect in the near future a shift of its use from research purposes to clinical forensic cases

Fibrous hamartoma of Infancy: An Italian multi-istitutional experience.

Fibrous hamartoma of infancy: an Italian multi-institutional experience. Carretto E, Dall'Igna P, Alaggio R, Siracusa F, Granata C, Ferrari A, Cecchetto G. Source Division of Paediatric Surgery, Department of Paediatrics, University of Padua, Padua, Italy. Abstract BACKGROUND: Fibrous hamartoma (FH) of infancy is a benign mesenchymal tumor, occurring as a superficial mass. Complete excision is curative. OBJECTIVE AND METHODS: The clinical features and treatment results of 18 children with FH are described. RESULTS: Local excision was the most common procedure. Surgery was radical in 10 patients, with microscopic residual disease in 6; all of them are alive with no evidence of disease 2 to 49 months after diagnosis. One patient, treated with a local reexcision for macroscopic residual disease (and chemotherapy for a synchronous desmoid fibromatosis) is well 83 months after diagnosis; the last patient, with a lesion of the labia majora, only underwent biopsy and is doing well, awaiting plastic surgery. LIMITATIONS: The results did not reach statistical significance due to difficulties in collecting cases. CONCLUSIONS: FH should be treated by complete excision; in our experience a nonradical excision was also able to achieve the cure. An aggressive approach should be avoided, as the overall prognosis is excellent. PMID: 16635660 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE

The processing of actions and-action words in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis patients

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease with prime conse- quences on the motor function and concomitant cognitive changes, most frequently in the domain of executive functions. Moreover, poorer performance with action-verbs versus object-nouns has been reported in ALS patients, raising the hypothesis that the motor dysfunction deteriorates the semantic representation of actions. Using action-verbs and manipulable-object nouns sharing semantic relationship with the same motor represen- tations, the verb-noun difference was assessed in a group of 21 ALS-patients with severely impaired motor behavior, and compared with a normal sample's performance. ALS-group performed better on nouns than verbs, both in production (action and object naming) and comprehension (word-picture matching). This observation implies that the interpretation of the verb-noun difference in ALS cannot be accounted by the relatedness of verbs to motor representations, but has to consider the role of other semantic and/or morpho- phonological dimensions that distinctively define the two grammatical classes. More- over, this difference in the ALS-group was not greater than the noun-verb difference in the normal sample. The mental representation of actions also involves an executive-control component to organize, in logical/temporal order, the individual motor events (or sub- goals) that form a purposeful action. We assessed this ability with action sequencing tasks, requiring participants to re-construct a purposeful action from the scrambled pre- sentation of its constitutive motor events, shown in the form of photographs or short sentences. In those tasks, ALS-group's performance was significantly poorer than controls'. Thus, the executive dysfunction manifested in the sequencing deficit ebut not the selec- tive verb deficite appears as a consistent feature of the cognitive profile associated with LS. We suggest that ALS can offer a valuable model to study the relationship between (frontal) motor centers and the executive-control machinery housed in the frontal brain, and the implications of executive dysfunctions in tasks such as action processing