Link To And Excerpt From “Medical Mysteries: A college student’s near fatal collapse uncovered a frightening family legacy” From The Washington Post With A Links To Additional Resources On The Prevention Of Sudden Death

Additional Resources For The Prevention Of Sudden Death

• 2015 ESC Guidelines for the management of patients with ventricular arrhythmias and the prevention of sudden cardiac death: The Task Force for the Management of Patients with Ventricular Arrhythmias and the Prevention of Sudden Cardiac Death of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) [PubMed Abstract] [Full-Text HTML] [Full-Text PDF]. Eur Heart J. 2015 Nov 1;36(41):2793-2867.
• Catecholaminergic Polymorphic Ventricular Tachycardia
  Synonym: Catecholamine-Induced Polymorphic Ventricular Tachycardia (CPVT) [Full-Text HTML]. GeneReviews® Initial Posting: October 14, 2004; Last Update: October 13, 2016.
• The Evaluation Of Syncope In Primary Care – Help From The “2018 ESC Guidelines for the diagnosis and management of syncope”
  Posted on May 3, 2018 by Tom Wade MD
• The Treatment Of Syncope In Primary Care – Help From The “2018 ESC Guidelines for the diagnosis and management of syncope”
  Posted on May 6, 2018 by Tom Wade MD

In this post, I Link To And Excerpt From “Medical Mysteries: A college student’s near fatal collapse uncovered a frightening family legacy“* in The Washington Post, by Sandra G. Boodman, April 24, 2021 at 10:00 a.m. EDT.

*Medical Mysteries is a monthly  column created and written by Sandra G. Boodman, Washington Post Medical Reporter.

Here is the excerpt:

The phone call that irrevocably changed the lives of Nanette Bentley and her family came at dinnertime.

A day earlier Bentley, public relations director for a Cincinnati hospital system, and her husband, Matt, who works in financial services, had returned from parents’ weekend at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin, Ohio, where Olivia, one of their three college-age daughters, was a sophomore.

The caller told Bentley that Olivia had just been found in full cardiac arrest and without a pulse in the stairwell of her dorm during a fire drill. A campus security officer had responded immediately, administering a defibrillator to restart her heart before she was rushed to a 25-bed hospital a half-mile away.

Olivia was alive — but unresponsive. Bentley replied that she had no idea why the healthy 18-year-old had collapsed.

As [her parents] raced up the interstate, Olivia was airlifted to a bigger hospital in Lorain, 30 miles from Oberlin. Doctors were keeping her alive on a ventilator as they scrambled to figure out what had gone so wrong.

The answer, which would emerge two months later in January 2019, had implications more far-reaching than the family could have imagined. And it would explain an unusual tragedy that had marked Bentley’s childhood 46 years earlier.

See the rest of the article to learn the cause of the cardiac arrest.