Fabrice Muamba gets heart attack in FA CUP and game is suspended.

[Farhad-7]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/foo...=feeds-newsxml

get well soon muamba

[AllStarMomo]

Damn! I like him so much! Hope he will survive!

[Soroush-IK]

Thank God it seems he will be ok.

[Ghermez Agha]

hopefully he will be ok, terrible to see things like this happen in football!

[kaebi kabab]

#prayformuamba

[EKBATAN]

any video of when it happened?

[tashakor]

[Butaloh]

I read about this and saw the brief bit of video where he looks to be having a seizure. Seizures commonly happen when the brain doesn't get enough blood flow from the heart. Most likely he experienced Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD). This is when some inciting event results in a rapid ventricular heart rhythm, wherein the lower chambers of the heart are beating so fast they can't effectively pump out full volumes of blood with each stroke, and cardiovascular collapse eventually occurs. The fact that the paramedics had to deliver shocks sort of confirms that scenario. Ventricular fibrillation and rapid sustained ventricular tachycardia are by far the two most common reasons you would shock someone who's suffered cardiac arrest.

In people above 35yo, SCD usually follows a heart attack or severe ischemia of heart muscle short of an actual heart attack, but that's almost certainly not what happened to this guy. Twenty something year olds don't typically have heart attacks, especially not twenty something year olds who are fit and unlikely to be using cocaine actively. When SCD happens to a young healthy person, its usually either due to a gross structural heart defect, or a genetic problem where the molecular channels that determine electric flow on the membranes of cardiac muscle cells are malfunctioning. Sadly in a large percentage of cases in young people, you never figure out why it happened and they just end up getting an internal defibrillator device placed to protect against future occurrences.

As far as what's going to happen from this point forward, it all depends on what extent of insult his brain suffered while the heart wasn't pumping blood properly. Something many people don't realize, probably because of misrepresentations on medical TV dramas, is just how bad we are at resuscitating people successfully with CPR. I mean we really suck at it. Based on US centered research, success rates (measured as number of people still alive 3 months after undergoing CPR) are about 5-10%. One in ten, and that's under the most ideal circumstances where the person is otherwise healthy and medical personnel are able to get to them immediately after a witnessed collapse. The good news for Muamba is that his episode fits the description of the ideal situation perfectly. The bad news is that the paramedics seemed to be working on him for a good 10-15 minutes on the field and continued to administer CPR as he was carted away. Prolonged course of CPR is a very very bad prognostic sign.

At this point he's most likely in a CCU, being kept fully sedated and maintained on mechanical ventilation. If he's lucky he's at a medical center that can perform state of the art interventions like 'cooling protocol', where his body temperature would be artificially reduced to prevent ongoing damage to his brain from whatever period of low blood/oxygen flow it experienced. The fact that he's at a center called "Chest Hospital" suggest it's a place that deals specifically with cardiac pathology so he's probably getting the most advanced care indicated.

At some point over the next 24-48hrs they'll start to take down the sedation in order to see what kind of brain function he has left. Best case scenario, as the sedation wears off he'll simply wake up and start responding right away. He won't be able to talk initially because there'll be a breathing tube going down his airway, but you'd want to see him following commands appropriately ("move your left arm, squeeze my hand, show me two fingers on your right hand", etc.). But he might wake up and not be completely there cognitively or physically (to a varying degree of severity), and this can be partially reversible or permanent. Worst case scenario he doesn't wake up at all despite being off sedation for a sufficient amount of time, at which point his doctors will do brainstem reflex testing and electroencephalography to determine the extent of damage (anoxic encephalopathy, cortical death, brain death, etc).

Anyhow, that's the usual progression of this sort of thing, and despite good and bad prognostic signs and speculation, there's really no telling what's going to happen until they try and wake him up. Hopefully the immediate care he was able to get when he went down makes the difference and he can have a full recovery.

[Abbas85]

^holy wall of text batman!

[EKBATAN]

poor guy

thanx for the vid...but i wanted to see what happened before that seizure...did he get fouled or did he just collapse?