A favorite movie of mine involves a 16-year-old girl dying. Her actual cause of death was “murder by a vengeful ghost,” but no one knew and her cause of death was listed as heart failure.
In a scene between the girl’s mother and the girl’s aunt, her mom says something to the effect of “I spent four hours searching on the internet; there has never been a case of a healthy 16-year-old’s heart just stopping.”
Is this premise true? Has there ever been a case of an otherwise healthy child or teenager simply falling over dead, with no known cause?
Definitely not true. Though unusual, hearts can simply stop. Be hit by a tiny force in exactly the right place at the absolute right moment, and you have a slim chance of your heart just quitting. Or you could have a heart attack even at a young age.
While in general, young people have healthy hearts, or heart problems so severe they show up early in childhood and are diagnosed, this doesn’t preclude at all individual people from having a heart defect that has not been detected yet, esp. as young people don’t get thorough exams like 40 year olds, yet get a lot of stress both physical from sudden growth and hormone imbalances, as well as psychical the stress with parents, school and the world at large. Add a sudden fright, and even a healthy-looking person’s heart can suddenly stop due to a hitherho undetected weakness.
Not quite teens, but several years ago, 5 members of a national sports team (Rowers? Track? forgot which sport) keeled over dead from heart attack at practice. Nothing strenous, and everybody was surprised because athletes are assumed to be healthy. Turned out they had a slight cold, but didn’t want to rest the required time (usual recommendation: 1 week in bed, plus 1-2 weeks of no sports) because at the level of national teams, missing practice for 1 week or more would lead to loosing their muscle mass and fitness.
So they kept on doing light training sessions, which, coupled with fighting the infection, was simply too much for their hearts. Other people have gotten permanent heart weakness by doing sports too soon after a cold.
And adults also - well not regularly, but often enough to be known in medical lit. - keel over from previously undiagnosed heart problems. While a stress EEG might show up some serious problems, or blood work show serious out of wack levels, small defects can be very hard to detect unless you do the full show of ultrasonic, CAT scan, contrast angiography and so on - and why would you do that, what reason would you have?
Sudden Arhythmic Death Syndrome is when a person’s heart suddenly stops with no structural defect found on autopsy - i.e. nothing to show what went wrong. There are several (extremely rare) inherited conditions that can cause the heart to beat abnormally and possibly suddenly stop, and sometimes people with these conditions won’t show any symptoms until their sudden death.
I am surprised that anyone is surprised by this. It isn’t common but it certainly comes up every few years among people that I have had some association with. It happened most recently during a Thanksgiving day party that my SIL attended. A supposedly healthy 19 year old male just dropped dead. The cause was a previously undetected heart defect but the technology to determine that isn’t that old and isn’t available everywhere. Medical examiners can be a little vague in their findings as well when they aren’t completely sure themselves. They have to list something as the cause of death. When in doubt, a good cause of death is sudden heart failure because that always happens when somebody dies anyway.
Long QT Syndrome can certainly do it. There are apparently several genetic mutations and a couple of dominant alleles which can cause it, and it has a very bad habit of not looking like much except an occasional fainting spell or tachycardia until it throws the person with it into ventricular arrhythmia, and they drop dead. shudder
I don’t get the shudder. Seems like an ideal way to depart the planet. Maybe a little earlier than planned, but you won’t be around to notice the shortfall.
Being dead is easy. It’s the dying part to get there that sux.
It’s important to keep in mind that there is the cause of death, and there is the known cause of death. There is always a cause, but it may not always be known. Whether or not it becomes known depends a lot on how (or indeed if) one looks for it. The point seems overly pedantic but it’s not. The extent and thoroughness of a death investigation is TOTALLY dependent on where someone dies and the agency (sometimes just one person) who has jurisdiction over death investigations in that area. Quite literally a 16 year old who drops dead, depending on the jurisdiction, could get a complete autopsy and examination, including looking for exotic zebras like Long QT Syndrome (which is probably not as uncommon as many think), or it might get a cursory look and wave of the hand and the death certificate signed as “heart failure”. Or anything in between.
Having said all that, there are things some that can easily slip by even a relatively thorough autopsy. LQTS, as mentioned, is one (testing for it is very expensive). Electrolyte imbalances (say, from clandestine bulemia, not a far out notion in a 16 year old girl) is another, and there are more. And then sometimes people just drop dead, and even a pretty thorough autopsy (and I’d like to think mine are) comes up with nothing. It’s spooky. The thought is that the cause is for some reason beyond the resolution of the tools and techniques we can, if not possibly, than certainly practically, employ in a given case. Maybe “vengeful ghost” is on to something.