Defibrillators key to saving lives
High-profile young athlete deaths raise alarm, but most cases happen off field
TORONTO — The stories are always shocking: A young, often super-fit teenager or young adult drops like a stone during an athletic event, dead before they hit the ground.
The obvious incongruity of sudden cardiac death in an athlete perplexes the public and alarms parents of young sportsmen and sportswomen who may see their own children in the lifeless bodies of the stricken.
A new Canadian study may relieve some of those concerns. It finds that the majority of sudden cardiac death cases don’t happen during exercise, at least in young adults.
In fact, the highly visible deaths of athletes — or the deaths averted because of rapid resuscitation, as in the cases of former NHL player Brett MacLean or Premier League footballer Fabrice Muamba earlier this year — are the exceptions. Most sudden cardiac deaths happen off the field of play, among people who are not exerting themselves.
That’s important to know, not just because of the relief it may provide some parents. Targeting heart resuscitation equipment — such as automated external defibrillators or AEDs — at sporting events probably isn’t the best use of the resources, says Dr. Andrew Krahn, a cardiologist in the medical school of the University of British Columbia and one of the authors of the study.
“If we’re going to try to prevent this problem, we need to be aware that the problem is not a sports problem. The problem is really an infrequent but tragic death that happens usually at home and usually at rest,” says Krahn.
“Putting it (an AED) at the Y is a sensible thing to do, but not at the exclusion of putting it at the mall. Or the school.”
The study was presented Monday in Toronto at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress, a scientific meeting co-hosted by the Canadian Cardiovascular Society and the Heart and Stroke Foundation.
The findings suggest training people in CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) and making AEDs available in more public places could save more people from sudden cardiac deaths, says Dr. Beth Abramson, a Toronto-based cardiologist and researcher funded by the Heart and Stroke Foundation.
“Our goal is to make AEDs as available as fire extinguishers in public places from Yellowknife to St. John’s,” Abramson said in a statement. “The odds of surviving a cardiac arrest can increase to up to 75 per cent when early CPR is used in combination with an AED in the first few minutes.”
She notes the importance of a rapid response was demonstrated this summer when MacLean suffered a cardiac arrest while playing a pickup hockey game in Owen Sound, Ont. Players performed CPR and a spectator ran for the arena’s AED. MacLean survived, though his professional hockey career is over.
Krahn, who until recently lived in Toronto, worked with colleagues to identify cases of sudden cardiac death among coroners’ reports in Ontario. They looked at 174 presumed cases that occurred in 2008 in people aged two to 40. (Sudden cardiac death doesn’t happen exclusively to the young, but for the purpose of the study the researchers wanted to focus on children and young adults.)
Up to 40,000 Canadians of all ages die of sudden cardiac arrest each year, according to the Heart and Stroke Foundation. Krahn says the Ontario numbers suggest that nationwide about 500 to 700 young people die this way each year.