ArticleInternational journal of legal medicine2025
An assessment of the Henssge method for forensic death time estimation in the early post-mortem interval.
Article in International journal of legal medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Development of a mobile application to estimate time of death based on the compound method.International journal of legal medicine · 2026Article
- The use of spleen biomechanics in forensic pathology.International journal of legal medicine · 2026Article
- Post-mortem supravital skeletal muscle excitability for early post-mortem interval estimation: a scoping review and methodological map.Forensic science, medicine, and pathology · 2026Review
- Reply to the commentary of Burkhard Madea and Elke Doberentz on our article "An assessment of the Henssge method for forensic death time estimation in the early post-mortem interval".International journal of legal medicine · 2025Article
- Advancing time-since-interval estimation for clandestine graves: a forensic ecogenomics perspective into burial and translocation timelines using massively parallel sequencing.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundTime-since-death (TSD) diagnostics are crucial in forensic medical casework. The compound method by Henssge and Madea, which combines temperature and non-temperature-based techniques, is widely used to estimate TSD. This study aims to validate the predictive ability of this method in a cohort of 76 deceased individuals with known times of death (TOD).
methodsA convenience sample of 76 deceased individuals was examined at the Institute of Legal Medicine, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. The study included individuals who died at the hospital and those with sudden death in public. Exclusion criteria included age under 18, known infection or sepsis, polytrauma, bleeding, and hyperthermia. The TSD interval was calculated using the Deathtime software.
resultsThe overall agreement between the actual TOD and the 95% prediction interval for the TSD was 36.8% (95% CI: 26.1 to 48.7). Warm-stored corpses showed a higher agreement (61.9% [95% CI: 38.4 to 81.9]) compared to cold-stored corpses (27.3% [95% CI: 16.1 to 41.0]). Factors such as body mass index (BMI) and body surface area (BSA) were found to influence the odds of agreement. Assuming a plausible range of ambient temperatures between death and admission improved the agreement in cold-stored cases.
conclusionThe study found low to moderate agreement between the actual TOD and the 95% prediction interval using the Henssge method. Incorporating BMI and BSA could improve the predictive accuracy of TSD estimations. Further research with larger sample sizes and external validation is recommended to refine the model.
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