Injuries to the hyoid bone and laryngeal cartilages: effectiveness of different methods of medico-legal investigation.

The article is devoted to the comparative analysis of effectiveness of the most widely used methods for medico-legal examination of the hyoid bone and laryngeal cartilages, i.e. palpation, radiography and complete preparation. A consecutive study of 137 cases of hanging (including 20 cases of roentgenological analysis) showed that the former two methods can reveal less than 60% of injuries (fractures, infarctions, fissures etc.); at the same time, false diagnostics may occur. These methods can be used only as preliminary, guiding ones, and cannot substitute stereomicroscopic investigation of the skeletized hyoid bone and laryngeal cartilages, which made is possible to find injuries in 76.6% of suicidal hangings.