The Post reached out to Dr. Marc Cohen, Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Newark-Beth Israel Medical Center, to see what may have caused Bronny James’ health scare.
The sports world was stunned to learn on Tuesday morning that Bronny James suffered cardiac arrest while practicing basketball at USC on Monday.
To learn about what might have caused the incident, The Post reached out to Dr. Marc Cohen, Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Newark-Beth Israel Medical Center, who has not examined James.
NY Post: What are the possible factors that could cause a healthy 18-year-old athlete to have a cardiac arrest?
Dr. Marc Cohen: The heart has two major coronary arteries — the right coronary artery and the left main coronary artery. Those arteries come off at certain angles of the large blood vessel called the aorta.
If you’re born with those arteries coming off in unusual places, they may not manifest any problem for years, and then as you get older it’s possible that during a larger amount of exertion the different origin of that coronary artery can result in a restriction of the amount of blood that flows to that artery.
So, the first way that this could happen is if he was born with an Anomalous Coronary Artery. That could trigger a sudden cardiac event.
There are some patients for whom this is a problem from birth, and then there are others who survive to 15 or 18 or maybe 30 or 40, and then at an older age it causes trouble.
This could be that Bronny was born with a congenital condition that didn’t manifest at birth, but did later in life.
The second possibility is that he had what is called an underlying cardiomyopathy. That means that his heart muscle may have some kind of scar tissue, and there are different reasons why scar tissue can develop in the heart. That scar tissue might have triggered an arrhythmia — an irregular heart rhythm.
For example, he could have sarcoid cardiomyopathy. He could have been born with a little bit of a cardiomyopathy that he could have managed with, and as he got older and bigger and heavier and did some heavy-duty exercise or working out, that could have precipitated the scar tissue to trigger an irregular rhythm.
