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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Does this happen in young, healthy individuals?

I was reading the Wikipedia article linked in another thread [1], and several of the "sudden" deaths were people in their 40s that appear to have been healthy.

Do you feel symptoms, eg. during exercise, that you should listen to so as to inform you to stop whatever activity you're doing? Feeling light-headed, short of breath, blurry vision, etc.?

I run and also perform in theater, so I'm a little anxious about this. (Not to be a hypochondriac.)

FWIW, I'm going to do some research on my own, but I'm always impressed with the well-informed audience on HN that spans many disciplines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_entertainers_who_died_...

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Last year med student here, sudden cardiac arrest commonly occur in young people. Apart from infectious myocarditis which you might notice as fatigue and reduced performance after you’ve suffered a respiratory infection, hypertrophic myocardiopathy and especially hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy is often hereditary and can be mortal without showing prior symptoms. That’s why after a patient’s death you usually examine their broader family if HOCM was the cause as it can be detected via ultrasound and treated pharmacologically or interventionally (injecting alcohol in the obstructive parts or implanting a defibrillator).

I'm adopted. Can I find out if I'm at risk from a DNA mapping service like 23andme?

> it can be detected via ultrasound and treated pharmacologically or interventionally

To me that sounds like a more reliable way to find out.

Prevalence is 200 per 100k so you’re almost certainly not affected. If you want to be sure a routine ECG and a trans thoracic ultrasound usually is sufficient to diagnose / exclude cardiac myopathy. 23andme doesn’t even look at the whole genome, they just look for common disease associated polymorphisms. No way of telling if you have a mutation that’s not in their database and even if you have a mutation it could be deactivated epigenetically or other factors could lead to you not suffering the disease.

> Last year med student here, sudden cardiac arrest commonly occur in young people.

I think you mean that in the population of people who experience Sudden Cardiac Arrest/Death, many of them are young people. SCD is definitely not "common".

Yes, sorry, should have clarified that. Although generally speaking HCM/HOCM is not a rare disease either and definitely not a negligible cause of non-traumatic mortality cause in younger people.

Had it happen to a classmate in school.

I seem to remember it's either second or third most common cause of death in young people (in rich countries), usually behind traffic accidents.

But that has to be considered together with the fact that, generally speaking, young people just don't die.

Oh, and to fuel your paranoia: had a friend die in Moscow from a stroke. Death could have easily been prevented, if they had called paramedics and not the police, who thought he had taken drugs and just locked him in a cell where he died 8 hours later.

That is pretty horrible. Of course the police would suspect drugs. Maybe they should mandate medical personal being available in every police station.

One of our teachers went jogging and just dropped dead from an aneurysm in the brain. His wife told us that he wasn't feeling too well that day, but good enough for a little bit of exercise.

He was 33 when he passed and was the youngest teacher we had. His condition was only detected after his death. I don't know if it could have been prevented and if this form of atery damage could have been repaired.

I'd say nobody should even end up in a jail cell if all that happened is that person complaining of nausea, pain, and blurred vision. Or really any medical symptoms.

I'd go as far as saying even someone yelling "I have taken drugs", or having needles stuck in every visible vain should get medical treatment first. In most countries, taking drugs (as opposed to possession and/or sale) just aren't crimes, anyway.

I think some people are born with heart defects that can result in sudden cardiac death as a young adult. Also strokes. In half a century I doesn't know of any friends or friends that had that happen. But then again I know of three people that died when the car they were working on fell off the jack.

> But then again I know of three people that died when the car they were working on fell off the jack.

Yikes. I had my car fall off once when I was standing next to it getting ready to go under. Now I put two sets of jackstands under it, and give the car a hard shake first.

I've had it happen twice, once with a trolley jack and once with the car jack. In both cases the ground was a softer than I realised. There is no way I would crawl under without axle stands.

Good idea. Never assume the jack is enough.

Yes it mostly happens in young-er individuals because the reasons behind it are most likely genetic/hereditary and thus these people often don't live long enough to die from them later on. Some reasons include hypertrophic conditions( I'm not 100% sure on the english terms and I'm still an undergrad). Other reasons have to do with problems on ion channels which cause issues with electrical signals traveling through the heart resulting in ventricular fibrilation( e.g. Brugada, but you might have had episodes of passing out in the past). Some of this stuff is detectable but it's hard and there's no effective screening of the population. You might want to get checked by a specialist if you have a family history of early sudden deaths.

Environmental factors include things like steroid abuse( often in conjunction with amphetamin usage, see Rich Piana suspicions).

I'm not a doctor but for some reason I get anxious about this as well. You said you run? My logic is that if I had a heart defect it would have showed itself playing sports growing up or during my time in the service.

A friend of mine knew someone who dropped dead on a hump to the range at Twentynine Palms.

In my particular case, Wolf-Parkinson’s has been known to kill young people (a college basketball player about 20 years ago comes to mind). My case was fixed with ablation. I asked the cardiologist, “isn’t that what killed that ball player a few years back?”

“Yup. And if it hasn’t killed you by now (in my 40s), it probably isn’t going to.” Didn’t make the tachycardia (rapid pulse) anymore fun when an incident occurred, but at least it wasn’t probably going to be fatal.

And as additional anecdata, I’ve seen a Cat 1 bicycle racer in his mid-30s drop dead mid-race from a heart-related thing. Just kind of quit riding and fell over; from my non-professional observation, it was a literal case of “dead before he hit the ground”.

Famously footballer Fabrice Muamba had a cardiac arrest while playing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Muamba#Cardiac_arrest_...

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