Glycogen Test

GLYCOGEN TEST, used to distinguish violent death from natural death, was first proposed by Professor Lacassagne in 1897. It is based on a fact pointed out long ago (in 1849) by Claude Bernard that liver carbohydrates disappear in natural death and are preserved in violent death. Claude Bernard indicated that prolonged suffering and all causes exhausting the organism can stop the glycogen function of the liver. The results of these studies by Claude Bernard are confirmed by numerous scientists; as applied to forensic medicine, with the help of the glycogen test of the liver, one can determine whether death occurred slowly or suddenly, which has also been confirmed by experiments on animals. Kryukov, based on his research, concluded that in cases of natural death from slowly progressing pathological changes, liver carbohydrates almost always disappear; conversely, in cases of death from pathological phenomena that rapidly impaired life-sustaining functions (paralysis of respiration, heart, etc.), the liver always contained glycogen and sugar. In violent death, if the fatal outcome occurred rapidly, carbohydrates were present in the liver in large quantities; if, however, the violence caused a prolonged illness or a sharp disruption of the organism's function, the liver carbohydrates disappeared. Poisoning by cerebral, rapidly acting poisons does not cause the disappearance of liver carbohydrates, whereas poisons that deeply disrupt the functions of the organism or lead to slow dying also lead to the complete destruction of liver carbohydrates. The glycogen test of the liver is of great importance when resolving the question of whether a person died from alcohol or cold: in all cases of death from cold, liver carbohydrates were always absent; in poisoning by alcohol, however, they were always found; this observation is especially valuable when there are also traumatic injuries and a significant degree of putrefaction. It has been experimentally elucidated that liver glycogen slowly disappears during putrefaction, while sugar remains, although in a reduced amount, until the complete decomposition of the liver tissue. Methods for determining glycogen and sugar have been developed in detail, but for forensic medical purposes, only the very fact of the presence or absence of carbohydrates is important, which is established by a very simple method, even in the absence of a laboratory and accessible to every expert, used by Kryukov: a part of the liver (about 100 g), taken at autopsy, is immediately or after some time cut into small pieces, boiled in an enameled pot in distilled water with the addition of acetic acid (to precipitate proteins and albuminates), and then filtered; if the filtrate is of a milky-whitish color, then glycogen and sugar are undoubtedly present in the liver; if the filtrate is transparent, then there is no glycogen, and sugar may either be present or absent; sugar is determined by conventional methods, as in urine. The entire research procedure takes 10–15 minutes and is fully sufficient for forensic medical purposes.