SEATTLE — The safety for the Buffalo Bills, 24-year-old Damar Hamlin, was in critical condition in the ICU at a Cincinnati hospital on Tuesday. The Bills said he went into cardiac arrest after colliding with another player during Monday night's game against the Bengals.
As prayers come in from across the nation to Hamlin and his family, doctors here in Seattle shared how something like this can happen.
Doctor Jordan Prutkin with the University of Washington Medicine Heart Institute said cardiac arrest is not a heart attack, it is an electrical issue that causes a life-threatening fast heartbeat.
“So that is presumably what happened yesterday, is that something caused his heart rhythm to go super-fast and he needed to be shocked to get out of it,” said Dr. Prutkin.
Prutkin said this could have been caused by many different things. One possibility being discussed is Commotio Cordis, because Hamlin collapsed seconds after taking a hit in the chest.
“What that is, is when there's a sharp or a high force object that hits the center of the chest, and if there's a certain time window in the electrical signal of the heart, when that object hits the chest, it can cause a cardiac arrest,” said Prutkin.
Dr. Kim Harmon is the head physician for the University of Washington football team and does studies on sudden cardiac deaths in athletes. She said the rapid response she saw on TV during the Bills game when Hamlin collapsed is crucial. On the field medical teams administered CPR and used an AED defibrillator on Hamlin.
“The sooner you get CPR and actually more specifically, the sooner that you can get a shock to the heart to restart it, the better the outcomes are statistically,” said Harmon.
She also said it is important to recognize cardiac arrest because there are many other possible injuries in football.
“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.
Both doctors said they cannot speculate on exactly what happened to Hamlin but trust his doctors in Cincinnati are giving him the best treatment.
“I hear he's getting very good care,” said Dr. Prutkin. “And the important thing is that he's getting the medical attention that he needs at this point.”