Use of the National Register of medico-legal autopsies in epidemiological suicide research.

Finnish forensic pathologists have been keeping their own National Register of medicolegal autopsies (NRMA) since 1985. The aims of this work were to determine the reliability of this register by comparing the data with the cause-of-death statistics published by the Central Statistical Office of Finland (CSO) and to assess its usefulness for epidemiological forensic research. The comprehensiveness of the register over the period 1986-1991 was studied in general terms and tested by checking the inclusion of known suicides by physicians during that period. Coverage of the NRMA concerning definite suicides was 97% as compared with the cause-of-death statistics of the CSO. The conclusion is that the NRMA is reliable enough to allow changes in causes and manners of death to be examined in the relatively small homogeneous population of Finland. One of the NRMA's advantages is it's direct and rapid accessibility to different mortality data.