sudden death

Yesterday a person running the Virginia Beach half marathon (13 miles) collapsed and died. He was 23 years old and the cause of death is not yet known. In fact, his death is being investigated by the city's homicide division. He collapsed in front of EMS workers but died anyway.

The most common reason for sudden death is heart related. I do not know what caused the above persons death. I can tell you that heart related incidents occur about every 33 seconds and heart related deaths occur once per minute, in the US. As there are people running in every state, every day, one or two of those deaths is bound to happen to a runner.

The heart is a muscle and it pumps because of electrical stimulation. When something disrupts that circuitry the heart loses its ability to pump, blood doesn't go anywhere and within four to six minutes a person will die. You may have heard this term on TV, a patient goes into V fib or ventricular fibrillation. The heart muscle is fluttering. My dad died of that. He had underlying heart disease as do most people who die of sudden cardiac death.

There are specific things that cause this, like blood clots and inflammation as well hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy has been explained here before and is usually the reason behind the sudden death of young athletes.
http://yourhealtheducator.blogspot.com/2009/07/heart

Something else to consider about deaths at running and other sports events is the individual persons training and fitness history. We do have cases of weekend warriors whose bodies are not ready for these strenuous events and thus have adverse outcomes.

Heart disease is the number one killer in this country. Sometimes a person dies of a heart attack after doing every thing right to prevent one. Most of the time a person who dies of a heart attack did not.

BTW, a friend of mine told about her aunt today. Her aunt is in the hospital receiving treatment for a mild heart attack. Her aunt did not seek immediate medical attention, in fact, she sought it only after threats from her daughter. Speaking as a daughter of a heart attack victim.. very good advice there! Anyways, the point is that the aunt did not realize that the unexplained and peculiar pain in her jaw and neck was a sign of a heart attack.

more info on different heart conditions can be found here:
http://www.medicinenet.com/sudden_cardiac_death/page2.htm