Media: Sudden cardiac arrest among athletes 'rare' but also normal

Media operatives Tuesday struggled to explain the sudden cardiac arrest suffered by NBA star Lebron James’ 18-year-old son Bronny, who was hospitalized Tuesday after suddenly collapsing during basketball practice.

Nearly 2,000 athletes have suffered sudden cardiac arrests (SCDs) since the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines, 70% of whom have died. Prior to that, it was considered a “well-known occurrence” for an average of 27 athletes per year to suffer SCDs. Other recent reports have shown a disturbing recent 5-fold increase in cardiac events among FIFA players.

But news media have been grasping for explanations other than the COVID injections. In January, 44-year-old MSNBC anchor Yasmin Vossoughian blamed her sudden bout of myopericarditis on the common cold. That same month, media diagnosed NFL player Damar Hamlin, who suffered a cardiac atrrest mid-game, with commotio cordis — a condition so rare and improbable that it had never before occurred in NFL history.

On Tuesday, CNN operatives appeared to struggle with which narrative to choose to explain Bronny James’ condition, suggesting it was both rare and normal. CNN’s “medical expert” Dr. Sanjay Gupta could only offer “abnormality” as a possible cause.

“The cardiac arrest, what triggered that, what caused that, that’s what doctors are going to be sort of investigating over the next several days,” said Gupta. “This is rare. We know that a few thousand people who are young athletes do suffer sudden cardiac arrests every year. There’s also all sorts of different reasons that can happen, [like] electrical abnormalities of the heart.

Gupta then invoked Hamlin and commotio cordis, which primarily affects adolescents with thin chest walls — not healthy adult athletes wearing chest pads — and happens to about 20 Americans a year.

“We know for example with Damar Hamlin it was related to something called cordis commotio [sic] which is a blow to the chest wall,” Gupta continued. “We don’t know what happened specifically with Bronny James. But in any given year, this does happen thousands of times. Sometimes it can be a structural abnormality of the heart that was never really recognized until now. It wasn’t recognized until someone actually first has a problem with it. It could be an electrical problem with the heart and it wasn’t recognized until now.”

Last month, researchers thought they found a possible explanation for the recent “mystery” of cardiac arrests in young people, which they said has “no rationalizing explanation”. They suggested it may be due to exercising while having constricted carotid arteries.

“These findings may, therefore, provide a possible clue to the apparent mystery of sudden massive cardiac arrests of otherwise asymptomatic individuals working out in the gymnasium that keeps on killing human lives with no apparent rationalizing explanation,” said the researchers.