A few people have responded to my column today — in which I noted that “in the entire history of the NFL — as well as in the entire history of college football — no player has ever had a cardiac arrest on the field” — by pointing out that, in 1971, Chuck Hughes died of a heart attack while playing for the Detroit Lions.
That is factually correct. But I deliberately excluded Hughes because he died of a heart attack, not of a cardiac arrest, and because the cardiologist to whom I spoke before I wrote my piece was at pains to explain to me that these are not the same thing. A “cardiac arrest” is when your heart stops beating. A “heart attack” is when you develop a clot in one of your arteries which deprives your heart (or part of it) of blood. Here’s the Guardian explaining the difference:
Cardiac arrest, which is what Muamba suffered, is significantly different from a heart attack. The second is usually caused by coronary heart disease, through which a clot starves the heart of blood and oxygen and damages the heart muscle itself. Cardiac arrest, which can be caused by electrocution and the like, but is usually the result of a genetic unhappiness, can affect the healthiest hearts and simply means that they suddenly stop pumping blood properly, the heart’s internal electrical system having become temporarily scrambled: CPR is urgent and further more complex treatment is mandatory.
Given that it’s possible that Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest was the result of the hit to his chest (commotio cordis) — and that one obviously can’t develop a clot in the same way — this distinction is even more important.
That said, Hughes’s death is worth noting, and I should probably have made a passing reference to it in the piece — if just to reinforce how rare and unpreventable such occurrences are. Hughes, it turned out, had undiagnosed arteriosclerosis. As with Hamlin, fifty years later, there was nothing obvious that the NFL could have done about it.