Expert on commotio cordis says there's no way to prove it ever happened - Says it's a 'diagnosis by exclusion'

Damar Hamlin was released from the University of Cincinnati Medical Center today, one week after his dramatic collapse on the field after a tackle during the Buffalo Bills game against the Cincinnati Bengals, and transferred to a hospital in Buffalo to continue his recovery, the Bills announced.

Within an hour of the shocking incident on the evening of Jan. 2, several doctors on social media rushed to conclude that Hamlin’s collapse was due to commotio cordis, an ultra-rare occurrence in which the heart stops beating after a blow to the chest — usually from a solid-core object like a baseball or hockey puck — at the exact millisecond in the heart’s cycle when it is resetting itself.

But the nation’s top expert on commotio cordis, Dr. Barry J. Maron, says commotio cordis can never be proven to have occurred — and that it is instead just presumed to have occurred if no other cause is found.

“It’s a diagnosis of exclusion,” he told Crossroads Report.

What happens, he said, is that in cases where a person can be resuscitated after cardiac arrest following a blow, doctors do imaging of the heart — echocardiogram, EKG and cardiac MRI.

Dr. Barry J. Maron of Lahey Hospital in Burlington, Mass.

“They’re going to conclude that he doesn’t have an underlying cardiac disease,” says Maron. “So that becomes the definition of of commotio cordis — ‘In the absence of underlying disease.’”

Maron is the author of dozens of studies and articles on commotio cordis. In one of the most recent ones, from 2010, a total of 14 cases of commotio cordis were identified in football players nationwide over the course of 15 years.

When contacted by Crossroads Report, Maron said he didn’t know how many of these were related to tackles and how many involved a player hit with a ball.

There has never been another similar incident in the NFL.

The key to diagnosing commotio cordis, says Maron, is that it happens in a normal heart.

“It’s supposed to be in a normal heart. And, if he has a normal heart, other than what may have happened to him after the event…then that’s the diagnosis. It’s a chest blow causing a fatal arrhythmia in a normal heart.”

A normal heart is one that “doesn’t have a disease,” he says — which doctors could determine using imaging.

Imaging would also show whether an athlete had myocarditis prior to collapsing and going into cardiac arrest.

Myocarditis can be caused by viruses, and can also be caused by the Covid-19 vaccines.

An Oxford University study published in August showed that in a one-year period, 100 people in England died from myocarditis within 28 days of getting either the Pfizer-BioNTech or the AstraZeneca vaccine.