SEATTLE — Across the nation, people are still reacting to what happened during Monday night’s football game between the Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals.
The Bills’ 24-year-old safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field just moments after a tackle.
He remains in critical condition as of Tuesday evening.
With so many unknowns surrounding how and why this happened, KIRO 7 went to the University of Washington’s Medicine Center for Sports Cardiology in search of answers.
Dr. Jordan Prutkin, a cardiac electrophysiologist with UW Medicine’s heart institute emphasized that without specifics, the “why’s” surrounding what happened to Hamiln are limited.
“While we don’t know exactly what the cause was of it … people have been speculating that it could be something called commotio cordis,” said Prutkin.
Commotio cordis happens when a high-force object hits the center of the chest in a specific spot within the same time frame of the heart’s electrical signal.
The combination of events all at once can trigger cardiac arrest, though experts say the odds of this happening are one in 200 million.
This, of course, isn’t the only thing that could trigger such an event, and the physicians with UW Medicine made it clear that this isn’t to be confused with a heart attack.
“A heart attack is a plumbing problem, so that’s an issue where one of the arteries of the heart gets blocked. That’s very different than a cardiac arrest, which most commonly is due to an electrical issue where you have a life-threatening, fast heart rhythm,” explained Prutkin. “A heart attack in and of itself is not a life-threatening thing, but a cardiac arrest is a life-threatening thing, and it’s really important to get prompt CPR and AED if it’s a shockable rhythm.”
In their own research, Prutkin and Dr. Kimberly Harmon, Chief of Sports Medicine at UW, said that events like this, specifically in football, are rare.
“In the NCAA registry we did that looked at a decade of sudden cardiac arrest, we had three cases out of about 350 deaths … and they were all in lacrosse or baseball, so none in football,” said Harmon. “So this can happen, it can happen in football.”
This makes identifying matters of the heart challenging, especially in a sport where the focus is typically on preventing head injuries.
“If an athlete has a sudden collapse — they’re standing up and then they fall down — it should really be a sudden cardiac arrest until proven otherwise,” said Harmon.
The NFL said the game between the Bills and Bengals would not resume this week and that no decision has been made about playing it at a later date.
Hamlin’s accident comes amid growing concerns about the NFL’s handling of concussed players, and players from teams across the country are united in their message: the game is not as important as someone’s life and well-being.