A Minnesota Woman with heart disease technically died 10 times in 19 years but she is still alive, according to a report. The retired school teacher suffers from a heart muscle disease that affects one in 500 Americans.
She was fitted with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) â a device that jump-starts the heart if it stops beating â when medics diagnosed her in 2003, according to Daily Mail.
Wikimedia Commons
In one of the incidents, her heart suddenly stopped beating for 18 seconds. But the woman from Duluth in Minnesota was saved more than half a dozen times in the past two decades.
Her case shows the ‘power and durability of the devices’ for preserving life, according to doctors at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts.
The disease hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is caused by genetic mutations and medics believe that the disease is passed on through families.
Shortness of breath, chest pain, palpitations, and light-headedness, are the main symptoms of the disease.
Until the roll-out of ICDs, HCM used to be the most common cause of sudden death. But some of the sufferers have no symptoms and live a normal life.
More to follow
