Determination of sex from human adult sternum

Background: Forensic Medicine is a growing medical field with many subareas. General public usually associate the subject with the dead and autopsies alone. Forensic Anthropology is the sub field in physical anthropology, especially for solving criminal cases by applying skeletal analysis. The present study was done to study, compare, analyze the sternal measurements among both sexes and evaluate the reliability of different parameters of the adult sternum to determine the sex of an individual. Materials and Methods: Present study was a prospective study done at Department of Forensic Medicine at Kasturba Medical College, Manipal during the period of 2015-2018 on 92 dead individuals belonging to the South India, whose age was more than 18 years. The study population comprised of 47 males and 45 females and statistical analysis was done. The following measurements were obtained, M1-Length of manubrium; M2-Length of mesosternum; M1+M2-Combined lengths of manubrium and mesosternum; MCI-Manubrio corpus index; W4-Width of the sternum at the level of the fourth rib. Results and Conclusion: All the parameters were observed to be statistically highly significant with a p<0.001. This study reinforces that sexing of human sternum is possible with reasonable accuracy with combinations of new parameters.