"Dr Freddy Patel, the first to conduct a post mortem on Tomlinson's body, said the 47-year-old died of a spontaneous arrhythmic heart attack.
Patel reached that conclusion through a "process of elimination" after being unable to find the source of internal bleeding into Tomlinson's abdomen.
"When Tomlinson collapsed, paramedics and, later, an ambulance worker, connected him to a defibrillator. This gave ECG (electrocardiogram) readings (picture the zigzag lines you see on a beeping heartbeat screen).
Patel's view was that Tomlinson died of an spontaneous arrhythmic heart attack, caused by "ventricular fibrillation" (a fast, irregular wobble of the heart).
Patel conceded that he was not an expert, but said the ECG readings showed at times "chaotic" activity in the heart, which he said supported his theory.
The paramedic ECG charts showed Tomlinson had something called "pulseless electrical activity" – meaning electrical activity in the heart, with no pulse and no beating heart[*].
Another expert, Professor Kevin Channer, from the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield, has produced a report on Tomlinson's ECG chart readings.
He found the ECG readings showed normal activity. Crucially though, Channer said that pulseless electrical activity was inconsistent with ventricular fibrillation (the type of heart attack Tomlinson was said to have died from)."
* This isn't true, PEA means there is 'normal' electrical activity and no pulse - the heart may still be beating but not pumping around enough blood to give a pulse, this could be due, for example, to loss of blood from massive internal bleeding.
2 comments:
Heh. I am a mere physiologist lacking a medical degree, but I would back myself to be able to tell the difference between a normal ECG (or anything with QRS complexes, for that matter) and VF.
Do we think Dr Patel actually looked at the ECGs? Class?
Who knows? Asystole on the other hand is quite easy to mistake for fine VF but the article is pretty clear that he had PEA. Of course there can be runs of crap trace on an ECG that look a bit like VF (e.g. muscle artefact) but that isn't going to kill you.
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