Chest pads for sports: Do they protect against cardiac arrest?

Do chest protectors protect against cardiac arrest in sports? After NFL player Damar Hamlin's collapse, doctors say the evidence for young athletes is mixed.

Sports medicine specialist Dr. Kody Moffatt knows how seeing Damar Hamlin collapse in cardiac arrest on "Monday Night Football" has frightened parents of young athletes.

"Almost every family that I've seen in clinic since Tuesday morning has asked about this," said Moffatt, division chief of sports medicine at Children’s Hospital & Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska. "They were worried about chest impacts."

Such life-threatening injuries are extremely rare, and though it now appears that the 24-year-old Buffalo Bills safety is recovering, the incident was a gut punch reminder of how quickly injuries can happen.

Doctors at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center haven't announced what exactly caused Hamlin's cardiac arrest — the sudden loss of heart function — but during a news briefing Thursday they didn't rule out a phenomenon called commotio cordis.

Commotio cordis happens when a projectile — often a hockey puck or a baseball, for example — collides with a person's chest, throwing the heart's electrical system out of whack. The person goes into potentially deadly cardiac arrest.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/chest-pads-sports-protect-cardiac-arrest-rcna64606


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Updated: 1 year ago
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