Everyone is praying for Damar Hamlin after he collapsed on the field during Monday Night Football.
While the hospital hasn’t made a statement on his condition, multiple medical professionals believe that Hamlin suffered from Commotio Cordis, which rarely happens.
Here is precisely what that is.
Commotio Cordis refers to the sudden arrhythmic death caused by a low/mild chest wall impact. Commotio Cordis is seen mostly in athletes between the ages of 8 and 18 who are partaking in sports with projectiles such as baseballs, hockey pucks, or lacrosse balls. These projectiles can strike the athletes in the middle of the chest with a low impact but enough to cause the heart to enter an arrhythmia. Martial arts is a sport in which a strike of a hand can also cause the heart to change it’s rhythm. Without immediate CPR and defibrillation the prognosis of commotio cordis is not very good. This condition is extremely dangerous with rare survival.
The treatment of commotio cordis is not different from any other cardiopulmonary emergency associated with a nonperfusing cardiac rhythm. For victims of witnessed ventricular fibrillation arrest, as occurs in commotio cordis, early cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and rapid defibrillation can significantly increase the chances of survival.
Experimental data gathered using the commotio cordis swine model suggest that defibrillation within 1 minute of ventricular fibrillation onset results in a 100% survival rate and that defibrillation after 2 minutes results in an 80% survival rate.
We have seen it happen in hockey and baseball before, but this is believed to be the first time it has happened in the NFL.
Hopefully, Hamlin’s saving grace is that the medical professionals on the field immediately started doing CPR, and they did have a defibrillator on hand.
That has given Hamlin at least a fighting chance to survive this.
Flip the page for a doctor explaining how Commotio Cordis happened in this instance.
