Cardiologist Explains Cardiac Arrest With 3D Imaging Following Damar Hamlin’s On-Field Collapse

A cardiologist explained on MSNBC cardiac arrest with 3D imaging following Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin’s on-field collapse.

Hamlin fell to the ground after tackling Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins in the Monday Night Football game between the Bills and Bengals in Cincinnati. CPR was administered to Hamlin by medical personnel for 10 minutes. The game was temporarily suspended before being indefinitely postponed. Hamlin is currently in critical condition at University of Cincinnati Medical Center.

Appearing on Morning Joe on Tuesday, Dr. Bernard Ashby, a vascular cardiologist and professor, remarked “it’s well-known that the first minutes, seconds are critically important” when it comes to treating cardiac arrest.

He continued:

We have a saying in cardiology, in medicine in general, that every minute is oxygen deprivation and every minute decreases your likelihood of survival. So it’s important that anytime someone has a cardiac arrest, which is just another way of saying your heart stops, there’s are a bunch of things that can cause your heart to stop, but in his case it appeared to be v-tach of v-fib, which is ventricular arrhythmia. If treated right away, the chances of survival are actually pretty good. And if he gets the AED defibrillator early on, they do very well, particularly in younger, healthy people such as Mr. Hamlin.

Using 3D imaging in explaining what could have happened to Hamlin, Ashby showed what a normal heart looks like and its electrical circuits. He held up a model heart of what it looks like on the outside. Ashby then showed on the monitor what the heart is like when it’s in v-fib.

“Even though the heart is actually moving, it’s fibrillating, and so we still call this cardiac arrest because there’s no cardiac output going to the brain or other organs. And so that’s why CPR is so important,” he said. “That’s why we saw when you’re doing CPR you want to squeeze the heart because you want to increase that blood flow to the organs and maybe the brain because that really is what immediate year to dates your patient’s prognosis.”

Watch above via MSNBC.