Sexing the human sternum

Abstract

For differentiating a male from a female sternum, a metrical study of 400 adult North Indian sterna (312 males and 88 females) obtained from medicolegal postmortems was made. If the combined length of the manubrium and mesosternum was more than 140 mm. the sternum was male, and if less than 131 mm. it was female. No opinion could be given if the length was between 131 and 140 mm. By this measurement 72.12% male and 62.50% female sterna could be sexed with 100% accuracy. The length of the mesosternum alone could also determine the sex correctly in 50.32% male and 29.55% female specimens. The length of the manubrium, manubrium-corpus index, width of the first or third sterebra or their index, were not found to be useful in sexing a given sternum. By using multivariate analysis the probability of correctly identifying the sex of a sternum was over 85%.