Study of Pattern of Deaths due to Acute Pancreatitis

Acute pancreatitis is a protean disease which is usually mild and self limiting in most cases. The disease is severe and is associated with a high mortality in 5–20% of cases due to systemic complications culminating in multi-organ failure and shock. Acute pancreatitis in a subset of patients presents as sudden unexpected death and is diagnosed for the first time during autopsy. The majority of cases of sudden unexpected death can usually be attributed to a past history of illness, clinical features or characteristic findings on postmortem examination. The forensic pathologist or the medical examiner faces the daunting task of determining the cause of death in those cases without any antecedent causes, suspected violence, suicide or homicide and with no clinical history of illness.1 In this article, we are discussing series of cases with varied history where the sudden death was due to pancreatitis.