— Judgment, Supreme Court, New York County (David H. Edwards, Jr., J.), entered April 28, 1986, which granted the application of petitioner-respondent, and directed that petitioner’s application for accident disability retirement be remanded for further medical (psychiatric) evaluation and findings by the Medical Board, unanimously reversed, on the law, the petition dismissed, and the determination of the Board of Trustees reinstated, without costs.
Petitioner, a police officer appointed to the New York City Police Department on July 20, 1973, has had a history of hospitalization for rectal bleeding beginning in late 1982, and she has been on sick report almost continuously since November 1982. On June 28, 1984, the Medical Board diagnosed petitioner’s disability as ulcerative colitis. At that time the three members of the Medical Board, one of whom was a psychiatrist, rejected petitioner’s application for accidental disability retirement benefits, and on October 24, 1984, the Board of Trustees retired petitioner on ordinary disability.
The IAS court held that the failure of either the Medical Board or the Board of Trustees to make a determination of the cause of petitioner’s condition required a remand for further psychiatric findings and evaluation. This conclusion erroneously assigned the burden of proof on the issue of accidental injury to respondents; on the contrary, it is the applicant for accident disability retirement who has the burden of establishing that the disability is causally connected to a line-of-duty accident (Matter of Drayson v Board of Trustees,
It is undisputed that petitioner suffers from ulcerative colitis, which is a stress-related disease. But even if the stress were caused by the nature of petitioner’s employment, such a clinical evaluation would not constitute an accident, which requires "a sudden, fortuitous mischance, unexpected, out of the ordinary and injurious in impact” (Johnson Corp. v Indemnity Ins. Co.,