Deadly triggers: genetic drowning triggers may explain why otherwise healthy swimmers drown--and help insulate facilities from liability.(healthy swimmers athletes drown)

When perfectly healthy swimmers who are good athletes drown, it is often a mystery. Family and friends typically respond to these tragedies in disbelief, exclaiming, "How could this happen? He loved the water! He was such a good swimmer!"

Have you ever experienced or heard about a "drowning" to a good, healthy and fit swimmer? It happens more frequently than you might think.

But now overwhelming medical evidence indicates that good swimmers don't really drown--they die of other specific causes, known as "drowning triggers," that predispose them to death in the water.

Yet in far too many of these cases, coroners still have a habit of simply stating that their autopsy findings ".... are consistent with drowning."

Perhaps it is time to stop referring to all aquatic deaths as drownings and start understanding these drowning triggers. Wrongly identifying a healthy swimmer as a drowning victim definitely and permanently places a shroud of guilt over the aquatics facility, its management and lifeguards. At the same time, too many swimmers may not know they possess these deadly drowning triggers, which leave no trace in an autopsy.

For years, cardiologists have recognized one of these drowning triggers. It stems from an EKG abnormality called the Long Q-T Syndrome, which predisposes people to death in the water, even to very good swimmers. The Long Q-T Syndrome is quite easily identified with an EKG during the subject's healthy state: If there is a long space, distance or synapse between the Q and T peaks in the Q, R, S, T points on an EKG, the individual is more likely to die a sudden death to an unanticipated cardiac event. These events often happen when a telephone rings in the middle of the night--or a swimmer begins a workout.

In fact, the Mayo Clinic found that of its 34 patients identified with Long Q-Ts, six had drowning episodes. Unfortunately, when a good swimmer dies in an aquatics facility, the only way to diagnose whether the victim suffered from a Long Q-T is by an EKG taken prior to the supposed drowning event. This is one reason many medical professionals believe that all ...