Neha Chaurasia, SK Pandey and Amarnath Mishra
Asphyxial death is a common incident in forensic practices, and determination of the manner of death that may be accidental, suicidal, homicidal, or natural is of utmost significance. In such deaths, a detailed and meticulous autopsy plays a major role to solve the case while the scene investigation and collection of samples have their own significance. Domestic violence plays a great role in suicidal and homicidal violent asphyxia deaths. Various epidemiological and demographical parameters of the study are described in the present study. Increasing deaths due to asphyxia are one of the most important causes in violent deaths. During the 4 year period from January 2008 to 31st December 2011, there were 542 asphyxial deaths autopsied conducted by the Department of Forensic Medicine, IMS-BHU Varanasi, India. Asphyxial deaths comprise 6.95% of all forensic autopsies; 35.79% of the cases are aged between 21-30 years; Males constitute 60.89% of all the cases. The most frequent method of asphyxiation death is hanging (283 cases, 52.21%), followed by drowning (45.02%) and suffocation (0.55%). More violent methods, such as ligature or manual strangulations, constitute 2.21% of all asphyxial deaths, respectively. Although it was varying according to the methods of asphyxiation, suicide was found to be the manner of death in the majority of the cases
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