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Abstract
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We believe it is necessary to state a premise on the framing of poison and poisoning in the context of Forensic Toxicology as an important contribution to this Special Issue, which is composed of articles about this discipline--the discipline of "poison".
Poison refers to any substance (solid, liquid, or gas) which, if assimilated in or brought into contact with any part of the living body, leads to the deterioration of health or, eventually, death through its constitutional or local effects. Every agent may be harmful if acting on an organism at a high enough dose.
Forensic Toxicology was born of the need for justice in the field of poisoning (accidental, suicidal, or fraudulent), so the most important task in this discipline is analyzing biological samples for the presence of toxics, including medicines and drugs of abuse.
The field of Forensic Toxicology involves other sub-disciplines: postmortem forensic toxicology, human performance toxicology, and forensic drug testing. All these sub-disciplines measure substances in biological matrices for a given purpose. The primary concerns of forensic toxicology investigators include determining whether a harmful substance can cause death, impair judgment (e.g., when driving or in the workplace), and change behavior, or whether it has a legitimate presence in the body.
Drug toxicity can result from the over-ingestion of medicines, causing too much of the drug to be in a person's system at once. This can happen if the dose taken exceeds the prescribed amount, or if the prescribed dosage is too high. For drugs of abuse, most of which are psychoactive drugs leading to tolerance, the poisoning happens when the dose exceeds the individual's tolerance.
This Special Issue aims to highlight and collect research on the established knowledge, as well as open issues, related to drug poisoning; it aims to depict the state of the art and provide new starting points for future advances, especially for new substances (NPS) and their mechanisms of action, while not forgetting the problems of traditional drugs, which are often the most involved in mortality.
We collected eleven contributions (articles, reviews, and case reports).
Regarding the articles, the predictors of mortality in illicit-drug users involving Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS) are defined in the NPS endemic era in the paper "Clinical Presentations and Predictors of In-Hospital Mortality in Illicit Drug Users in the New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) Endemic Era in Taiwan" by a team of researchers at the University of Taiwan [1].
In an interesting article by the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology (College of Pharmacy, University of Saudi Arabia), "Effects of Chronic Inhalation of Electronic Cigarette Vapor Containing Nicotine on Neurobehaviors and Pre/Postsynaptic Neuron Markers", the researchers present an experimental study concerning nicotine-exposed animal models that exhibit neurobehavioral changes linked to impaired synaptic plasticity. Such exposure was also associated with altered neurobehaviors, which might affect neurodegenerative diseases [2].
"Suicidal Behavior and Its Relationship with Postmortem Forensic Toxicological Findings" is presented by a group of authors at Murcia University and the Murcia Pathology Service (Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences). They emphasize that toxicological analysis is fundamental to understanding consumption patterns and in establishing strategies and protocols for detecting and preventing suicide [3].
Language: en |