Odontological identification of human remains from mass graves in Croatia.

This paper reports the results and methods of dental identification of 1000 human remains exhumed from mass graves in Croatia up to July 1998. Personal identification of the victims was performed at the Department of Forensic Medicine and Criminology at the School of Medicine in Zagreb. A forensic odontologist participated in the identification process by carrying out the dental identification. A total of 824 victims were positively identified, while 176 victims remained unidentified. Dental identification based on available dental antemortem data was achieved in 25% of the cases. Dental identification based on dental charts was achieved in 35%, on x-rays in 15%, on photographs of teeth in 22%, on interviews in 18%, and on confirmation by odontologists in 10% of the cases. Teeth, in combination with anthropological parameters, age, sex and height, as well as other specific characteristics such as tattoos, personal identification cards, clothes, jewellery and DNA, were helpful for identification of 64% of the victims, but the significance for the identification was not dominant. Only in 11% of the cases was identification achieved by other relevant means and teeth not used at all. Identification procedures in Croatia will continue until another 1700 people who are still missing or kept as prisoners of war since the aggression on Croatia in 1991 are found and/or identified.

[Copper levels in the tissues of patients with Wilson's disease]. / Koncentracije bakra u tkivima bolesnika s Wilsonovom bolescu.

The evaluation of tissue copper concentration is essential for the diagnosis of Wilson's disease. It is characterized by symptoms of the damages to parenchymatous organs, primarily liver and brain, due to chronic copper intoxication. The paper presents the autopsy tissue analysis of a 39-year-old patient diagnosed to suffer from the Wilson's disease while still alive. The patient died from sepsis due to burns caused by direct flame exposure. The standard histochemical staining of tissue samples failed to demonstrate the presence of copper but it was qualitatively proved by line spectrum-based mass spectrography. The copper concentrations in the liver, brain, and kidney (240, 73.8, and 30 micrograms/g wet tissue weight, respectively), measured by flame-atomic absorption spectrometry, were significantly elevated. In this study, the Wilson's disease was verified by a postmortem determination of increased copper concentration in the tissues. The results obtained contribute to the understanding of this rare disease.