Professional football player Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrestduring a game Monday night in Cincinnati. The 24 year old Hamlin is now doing much better, according to his family and teammates.
Doug Casa is a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Connecticut where he studies the health and safety of athletes and workers.
WYSO’s Chris Welter spoke with Casa about what happened to Damar Hamlin this week and how a quick response from medical professionals can help save lives.
Transcript (edited lightly for length and clarity)
Doug Casa: We certainly still don't know exactly what the cause of that cardiac event was. My hunch is that it was the case of Commotio cordis, which is a cardiac event that happens following a trauma. It has more typically occurred in things like baseball, lacrosse, ice hockey, where there's a small projectile that hits the heart at a particular time of the rhythm, it's about 1/800 of a second.It could cause an arrhythmia or a problem with the heart in terms of the functionality of a normal rhythm. It’s not common in football, although certainly it has happened in the past.
Chris Welter: How common is commotio cordis?
Doug: You could see ten or fifteen events in America per year, but it's usually in the eight to fourteen year old age group and you usually see it in youth sports that have projectiles.
Chris: If you're a parent of a young athlete, what can you do to protect your kid from these rare cardiac events that can come from trauma?
Doug: So the big thing that you want to do to survive a Commotio cordis event is having immediate care. So that would mean CPR being applied and then obviously having an athletic trainer on site. At the high school level, or youth sports level, having a licensed medical professional that is the first person to care for someone is important. As you saw with Damar Hamlin, the athletic trainers were working on him within ten, fifteen seconds of him going down and I would imagine CPR was probably started within a minute at the latest. Then they had him on a defibrillator within maybe another minute or less. That's the key.
Any parent at a youth sporting around, like if you're in an ice hockey facility with your kids, there needs to be a defibrillator at the youth sports complex because you cannot wait for an ambulance to arrive. Every minute that passes when a defibrillator is not administered, the survivability for the person goes down 10%. If you wait five, six, seven minutes for an ambulance to come, then there’s a really small chance that a kid's going to survive that cardiac incident. So I recommend that the defibrillator is out at the sports field, and we're constantly promoting having athletic trainers at every high school in America—two-thirds of the high schools right now in America do have access to one. We just cannot rely on the coaches to decide if a kid is going to live or die, whether it be a stroke, a cardiac event, a brain bleed like an epidural, a subdural hematoma, or an exertional cardiac crisis or diabetes or asthma. We want coaches to recognize it's a serious problem, but we want them to immediately get the athletic trainer there within a minute or two.
So having coaches trained in CPR, defibrillator access and having an athletic trainer are the keys to having success at the youth sports level.
Chris: When I grew up playing baseball, they sold protective heart equipment. Is there any equipment that you recommend young athletes wear?
Doug: There is research out there about protective heart equipment–you also have things like softer baseballs– which some people think change the likelihood of Commotio cordis. The evidence is not overwhelming because if you get hit in that particular cycle, it's not necessarily the speed of the ball, it's the timing of the hit. It doesn't have to be like 90 miles an hour so it could be 40 or 50 miles an hour if it hits you at that particular time.
So some of those protective mechanisms, they might be a good idea, but you still can have the episode happen anyway. You still need to have the precautions in place. It doesn't negate the necessity to have coaches be trained in CPR and have physical trainers and defibrillators accessible whenever it's feasible.
Certainly every high school in America should have athletic trainers there and big baseball tournaments, lacrosse tournaments, soccer tournaments, ice hockey tournaments should all as well. A lot of people have made it seem complicated over the last couple of days but it really comes down to getting CPR started as fast as humanly possible and having a medical professional there who can recognize what the condition is and how to react quickly.
Chris Welter is a reporter and corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms.
