[The analysis of neonatal deaths based on autopsy protocols of the Department of Forensic Medicine in Bialystok in the years 1955-2009].

The authors performed an analysis of the causes of deaths of newborns with special emphasis placed on cases when neonaticide was suspected. In the discussed period, 17838 medico-legal autopsies were performed, 124 of them (0.695 per cent of all postmortem examinations) involved children who meet the WHO criteria for newborn - children under 28th day of life. The newborns were divided into two groups according to their exact age at the time of death - newborns who died within a short time after birth and newborns who died after the perinatal period. Their sex, body length and body weight were also taken into consideration. A total of 108 autopsies (87.1 per cent of all autopsied newborns) involved cases of suspected criminal infanticide within the first score of hours postnatally. In the majority of these cases, the cause of death was suffocation, rarely mechanical trauma. The case of death of older newborns was broadly understood trauma.