Wednesday, May 14, 2003
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Wednesday, May 14, 2003 |
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Heart strike sometimes leads to deadly results By JOHN MUNFORD
The condition that caused the death of a Fayette County youth baseball player when he was struck by a pitch Friday evening is rare. And according to statistics compiled by medical experts, it's even rarer to find survivors of commotio cordis, which disrupts the normal rhythms of the heart after a blow to the chest. John Peter Ashmore's heart was bruised by the baseball that struck him in the left front chest, said Dr. Kris Sperry, the state's chief medical examiner who conducted the autopsy Saturday morning. Sperry said the cause of death was ruled as a disturbance to Ashmore's heart rhythm due to a blow to the chest. The result was that Ashmore suffered irreversible brain damage, Sperry added. According to the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation, 128 cases of commotio cordis have been studied, but only eight of the victims actually survived. Dr. Barry Maron, who works for the foundation and is recognized as an expert in the field, has said in published accounts that commotio cordis requires that an object strike the chest directly over the heart and precisely at a particular point in the heart's rhythm. Maron told the American Heart Association that the most vulnerable children are those 12 or younger who have narrow chest cages and/or underdeveloped chest muscles. "Striking the chest at any time is not advisable under any circumstances, even when the blow is trivial," Maron told the AHA during a conference in 2002. "The general public is largely unaware of the fact that striking the chest, even lightly, can sometimes result in death. ... Any blow to the chest, regardless of its intensity or velocity or force, is capable of producing cardiac arrest." The American Heart Association says the most effective treatment for cardiac arrest is quick cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and defibrillation (delivering an electric shock to the heart). Of the eight persons who survived commotio cordis, two were resuscitated by a defibrilator, according to the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation. An ambulance from the Fayette County Department of Fire and Emergency Services was on the scene Friday at the Kiwanis baseball fields five minutes and 24 seconds after being notified of the call from the county's emergency 911 center, but no defibrilator was used at the scene or in the ambulance trip to the hospital, according to Fayette Emergency Medical Service Deputy Chief Allen McCullough.
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