Background: Usually, autopsy refers to the postmortem examination of dead body. The purpose medicolegal or forensic autopsy is to establish the cause of death and to decide whether it is due to natural or unnatural causes. When gross and microscopical examinations, laboratory investigations and toxicological analysis even DNA Profiling fail to reveal a cause of death, the autopsy is considered to be negative. Objective: This study aimed to find out the ratio of negative autopsies among the total cases of medicolegal autopsies in a tertiary care hospital in Bangladesh.

Methodology: This retrospective observational study was conducted in the Department of Forensic Medicine, Sher-E-Bangla Medical College Hospital, Barisal, Bangladesh during the period from January 2018 to December 2018. In this study, autopsy data of 273 cases registered in the mentioned hospital during the previous 2 years of this study were collected and analyzed. Only fresh or minimally decomposed bodies with no external or internal injury were included. In cases where gross examinations, toxicological analysis, and microscopic examination failed to detect the cause of death was labeled as negative autopsies. All data were processed, analyzed and disseminated by using MS Excel.

Result: In this study, among the total of 273 study subjects, 13% (n=36) of negative autopsy cases were found. Among the total 36 negative autopsy cases, 56% were male whereas the rest 44% were female. In analyzing the primary physical examination results of the study subjects, we observed that decomposition cases were highest in number of 58%. Besides, skeleton remaining cases contributed 25% and fresh cases were found at 17% among the total negative autopsy cases.

Conclusion: The frequency of negative autopsies is higher among male cases than that in females. The frequency of 13% negative autopsies which was found in this study was higher than in many other previous studies.