In before the This has been happening for YEARS crowd.
Nothing to see, here....perfectly normal.
🙃
It has been happening for years.
Heart conditions and youth athletes
Sports-related deaths are mainly caused by coronary artery disease in adults and cardiomyopathy or arrhythmia in youths according to a 2018 review.
Other heart conditions, like myocarditis, can contribute to sudden cardiac death, but these conditions do not occur suddenly. Generally, a person with myocarditis would likely feel sick and not participate in the sport.
There is an occasion where bad outcomes like sudden cardiac arrest occur in an athlete. Sudden cardiac arrest is the leading cause of death in young athletes. Estimates vary, but some reports suggest that about 1 in 50,000 to 1 in 80,000 young athletes die of sudden cardiac death each year. For comparison, the incidence of sudden cardiac arrest in the general population is about 1 in 1,000 people yearly.
Sudden cardiac death is often caused by faulty electrical signaling in the heart. A very fast heartbeat causes the lower heart chambers (ventricles) to quiver uselessly instead of pumping blood. This irregular heart rhythm is called ventricular fibrillation. Any condition that strains the heart or damages heart tissue can increase the risk of sudden death.
At first, when young athletes started dying mysteriously, the “This has been happening for YEARS crowd” tried to downplay this by reminding us of Hank Gathers, a college basketball player who collapsed and died in the early 1990s due to a rare heart condition. As the post-vaccine death toll continued to mount, this explanation quickly lost its impact.