Drug-Induced Aplastic Anemia-A Forensic Overview and Review of Literature

Survivors of road traffic accidents often suffer from sequelae of the initial incident. Some of these sequelae are complications of the surgery, side effects of the drugs, and psychological events.

A case of a road traffic accident survivor is discussed, who succumbed to drug-induced aplastic anemia. The aplastic anemia resulted from unmonitored administration of phenytoin and NSAIDs, on which he was put on to combat the onset of neurological complications. We highlight the lethal hematological complication, aplastic anemia, caused by phenytoin and NSAIDs.

The role of a Forensic Medicine specialist in such type of brought dead cases, where history of the case is unavailable at the time of autopsy, is discussed here. As aplastic anemia is a pathological condition, such cases are rarely subjected to forensic autopsy and hence this topic is not commonly dealt with in Forensic Medicine based literature. Hence the authors are presenting this brought dead case and have also briefly reviewed the literature available on aplastic anemia.