How does a patient with a pacemaker die?
Brain damage, cancer, heart failure, 1920s death rays. All the usual ways.
Death these days is defined by when certain brain functions cease, not when the heart stops beating. So if, for example, they liver fails and the brain gets flooded with toxins the person is dead, no questions.
In cases where the immediate cause of brain death is heart failure pacemakers have little effect. The thing about pacemakers is they aren’t artifical hearts. Their only purpose is to keep the heart beating on time and in the right way. If a person bleeds so much that the heart doesn’t get enough blood to supply it with the food and oxygen it needs it stops beating. It doesn’t matter that the pacemaker is giving it little shocks to remind it to beat, the muscle is fatigued and can’t contract. The same applies to almost any other condition that would cause the heart to fail. The pacemaker only exists to remind the heart muscle to work and to make sure it works the right way. If the muscle can’t work then all the reminders in the world won’t help.
Strangely enough that even applies to heart disease itself. If the blood vessels supplying the heart become choked with fat and cholesterol the heart muscle starts to suffocate and drown in its own waste. If that goes on too long it dies. A pacemaker can’t do anything to help that. The muscle is dead.
What pacemakers are good for is stopping a person from dying after the immediate damage from such a blockage has occured. Because a chunk of heart muscle has died or been damaged from the blockage the heart starts to beat out of rhythm, and that can be fatal. The pacemaker ensures that it stays in rhythm. That problem is solved. But the problem of more tissue dying if more vessles choke up still remains And that can still cause death.