TY  - JOUR
A1  - Breitling, Benedict
A1  - Brunkhorst, Robert
A1  - Verhoff, Marcel A.
A1  - Förch, Christian
T1  - Post-mortem serum concentrations of GFAP correlate with agony time but do not indicate a primary cerebral cause of death
T2  - PLoS one
N2  - Background and purpose: The astroglial protein GFAP is a blood biomarker indicative of intracerebral hemorrhage in patients with acute stroke. Due to its brain specificity and the necessity of brain damage for its detectability in blood, we hypothesized that GFAP could be an interesting marker in cases with primary cerebral cause of death, e.g., traumatic brain injury.
Methods: All corpses scheduled for an autopsy in the Frankfurt Department of Forensic medicine within a 15-month period were included in the study. Cases with a known history of brain disease in the 3 months before death were excluded. During autopsy, blood was collected and GFAP serum levels were determined using a commercially available ELISA. The autopsy protocols were reviewed for the presence of a primary cerebral or a primary non-cerebral cause of death. Agony time was also determined.
Results: A total of 129 autopsy cases were included. GFAP concentrations did not differ between cerebral (median 0.96 μg/l, IQR 5.03) and non-cerebral causes of death (1.21 μg/l, 3.58). GFAP levels were found to be unaffected by hemolysis or post-mortem interval. GFAP levels were found to be increased in cases with prolonged agony times (median 1.76 μg/l [IQR 4.70]) compared to short (0.58 μg/l [0.58]; p<0.001) and ultra-short agony times (0.21 μg/l [0.12]; p = 0.002).
Conclusion: Post-mortem GFAP serum concentrations correlate with agony time and might therefore be useful for the evaluation of the severity of brain damage in prolonged death. Elevated GFAP serum levels do not indicate a primary cerebral cause of death.
KW  - Brain damage
KW  - Blood
KW  - Autopsy
KW  - Hemorrhage
KW  - Medical hypoxia
KW  - Traumatic brain injury
KW  - Cerebral ischemia
KW  - Blood-brain barrier
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/47679
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-476792
SN  - 1932-6203
N1  - Copyright: © 2018 Breitling et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
VL  - 13
IS  - (10): e0205323
SP  - 1
EP  - 11
PB  - PLoS
CY  - Lawrence, Kan.
ER  -