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Sudden cardiac death in athletes is extremely rare. However, a recent letter in the Scandinavian Journal of Immunology (Polykretis and McCullough - Rational harm-benefit assessment by age group are required for continued COVID-19 vaccination suggests that there have been as many of these types of deaths in the past 2 years as in the previous 38 years! Is that true? 

In this episode I looked into further evidence to see if these claims were true and whether, as Polykretis and McCollough suggest,  it has anything to do with COVID-19 vaccination. In particular, I looked at a paper by Bonaventura et al (Risks of the Athletic Field Revisited: Report of Unusual Occurrences of Cardiac Arrest and Sudden Death in Professional Soccer Players) published in the American Journal of Medicine looking at sudden cardiac death in professional football players in Europe between 2002 and 2022.

Whatever the cause, I think it is important that people learn how to use a defibrillator so that they can help if somebody does have a cardiac arrest. If you ring for an ambulance, they can tell you where the nearest defibrillator is and they are easy to use, with instructions provided - so don't be afraid to help in an emergency.