ABSTRACT

Coronary artery disease is a major cause of natural death. The high incidence and mortality of these diseases arised a need to investigate possible risk factors beyond well known. Diagonal ear lobe crease (DEC), was the physical sign, descri-bed in 1973. We investigated the possibility of DEC as a help-ful predictive sign in the postmortem examination of forensic sudden death cases.

The angiographic results revealed that whenever the percen-tages of the stenosis in left descending coronary artery, cir-cumflex artery and right coronary artery increased, the inci-dence of the DEC did so accordingly. These results were corre-lated with the previous studies reporting significant correlation between coronary artery disease and the DEC.

Particularly, in the absence of supportive medical history and without a physical sign of trauma, the presence of DEC co-uld well be a supportive sign for the physician to consider the coronary artery disease as a cause of death.

Keywords: Diagonal ear lobe crease, coronary artery disea-se, death investigation