[On the suitability of spectrophotometric analyses for the estimation of blood stain age (author's transl)].

The spectrophotometric methods of Kind et al. and Kleihauer et al. were checked by more than 900 experiments on 85 blood stains on different material (cotton, nyltest and paper) from native and citrate blood, aged at room temperature up to 5 years. As a result, the variation of values within one age-group exceeded the differences between the values of samples of different age. Therefore, both methods are thought to be unsuitable for the estimation of blood stain age in practical forensic medicine, although the general trend described by the above authors could be confirmed.