WE MUST PREVENT TEEN HEART TRAGEDIES s is a caption

June 21, 1994

HoW could a seemingly fit teenager die without any warning? rICHArD WooDNAM talked to the family of Andrew Lightwood, a young cricketer with no known health problems.

When his mother Angela saw him fall face first at a local cricket match, she assumed he’d tripped over his shoelace. In fact, 14-year-old Andrew was dying. His heart had stopped.

At first, Mrs Lightwood was told Andrew had died from viral pneumonia — a million-to-one chance that nobody could have foreseen or prevented. But Professor William McKenna, an international authority on sudden death syndrome (SDS) and a cardiologist at St George’s Hospital, London, was not convinced.

‘you don’t die suddenly from viral pneumonia,’ he says. ‘What’s more, if you do have viral pneumonia you have symptoms — such as fever and a cough — and you are bedridden, not playing cricket. Andrew must have had some underlying cardiac problem.’

Professor McKenna and Mrs Lightwood went on to back a major campaign launched by the National Sports Medicine Institute to prevent similar tragedies in young sportspeople.