Commentary: Mast cells and dendritic cells as a tools to discriminate vital and post mortem lesions

The determination of vitality and wound age is one of the most central research areas in legal medicine, about which a large amount of scientific work has been submitted for many decades up until now. In the first minutes or hours, standard histological examination may not determine whether the wound was inflicted in the pre- or post-mortem period. Since the study of cellular infiltrate might be a key to discriminate the vitality of lesions and since mast cell is one of the cellular type that participate to the organization of cellular infiltrate the behaviour of this cell is among the data which can be of help in that respect. Besides dendritic cells are another cell type involved in the response to injury even independent of antigen challenge e.g on the arterial wall and in the heart. This commentary is focused on the recent proposal to use mast cells and dendritic cells as cellular tools for the discrimination of vital and post mortem wounds.