Irregular heart rhythm? Try a taser

May 28, 2008
By Lester Haines, The Register

Connecticut doctors have provided circumstantial evidence that Tasers do affect the heart - backing critics' claims that the use of the "less-than-deadly" incapacitator may in fact prove resolutely deadly.

In the case of the belligerent 28-year-old patient admitted to Hartford Hospital, however, the end result of a light tasering was a swift recovery from atrial fibrillation, possibly provoked by his jumping into a freezing lake while attempting to escape pursuing cops back in April.

Cardiologist Dr Kyle Richards, who treated the unnamed perp in the hospital's emergency room, said: "I don't know exactly what he had done but he fled capture from them and he hid in a lake."

Richards noted in the Annals of Emergency Medicine that an electrocardiogram indicated the patient was suffering from the aformentioned irregular heart rhythm, "possibly as a result of the cold and shock".

Following treatment, the man became "very combative and started yelling in my face and that's when I left the room and got security", Richards continued.

Police and security operatives quickly followed the increasingly-popular hospital subjugation protocol and whipped out a Taser, administering a "low-voltage charge meant to cause pain" rather than the full-fat 50,000V shock.

A further electrocardiogram on the man "showed his heart rhythm was normal". Richards noted: "This is the first report of a patient receiving a shock of this kind and having a positive outcome."

Sounding a note of caution, though, Richards admitted the patient "was not hooked up to the electrocardiogram at the precise moment of being shocked", and stressed: "People can spontaneously go from atrial fibrillation into a normal rhythm without any intervention at all. You cannot conclusively say that the Taser did it."

Richards said he believed it did, concluding: "It's just one more thing that says, hey, Tasers can actually affect the heart."

Reuters notes that Amnesty Inernational has fingered the Taser in 290 North American deaths since 2001. Taser insists there is "no evidence the gun directly caused the deaths", as Reuters puts it.

The UN's Committee Against Torture disagrees, and back in November last year issued a statement on the TaserX26, which read: "The use of TaserX26 weapons, provoking extreme pain, constituted a form of torture, and that in certain cases it could also cause death, as shown by several reliable studies and by certain cases that had happened after practical use."

Among several notable Taser-related fatalilties is the case of 21-year-old Christian Allen, who was was pulled over by cops in Jacksonville, Florida, "because his [car] radio was too loud". When he and a passenger "took off running", as ABC put it back in November, an officer gave chase, caught Allen and "used a Taser gun at least three times before [he] was taken into custody".

Allen was put in the back of a police car, "suffered a cardiac arrest and died later at a hospital".

After taser shot, fugitive’s irregular heartbeat becomes normal

May 27, 2008, 2:25 pm
Jacob Goldstein, Wall Street Journal Health Blog

A 28-year-old man with a history of mental problems fled from the cops and spent 40 minutes hiding in a lake before they collared him and hauled him to the ER.

His body temperature had fallen to a chilly 89 degrees. Docs found speed and cocaine in his blood, and an ECG showed an irregular heartbeat.

Then things turned ugly. The guy got agitated, ripped off his electrodes and tried to pull out his IV. A cop stepped in and gave him a jolt to the chest with a Taser, and the suspect’s heart soon went back into a normal rhythm.

We’ve seen previous reports from the U.S. and Canada of people dying after being shot by a Taser, with some suggestion that it may be especially common in patients on illicit drugs.

But there’s still a debate over whether Tasers can be deadly. Some studies suggest that the devices may be able to affect the heart, but Taser International cites other studies that show they don’t.

The case report published today in the Annals of Emergency Medicine is the first time we’ve heard of someone’s heart possibly being knocked back into a healthy rhythm by the device. The young man’s heart was in atrial fibrillation, a condition in which the upper chambers of the heart quiver rather than beating properly. The larger lower chambers of his heart were beating 145 times a minute, which is abnormally fast.

That’s why the folks in the Hartford Hospital ER, where the true crime drama unfolded, called in Kyle Richards, a cardiology fellow who is the first author of the case report. In an interview this afternoon, Richards told the Health Blog the patient was “remarkably unhappy” to be in the ER, and grew combative. Richards called in security as the man pulled off the electrodes that were monitoring his heart. That was when the officer Tasered the patient. The hospital staff quickly reattached the electrodes and saw that his heart was in a normal rhythm.

The whole thing took about two minutes, Richards said. “The time course is so close is that it makes the Taser shock more likely as a cause of his conversion” back to a normal rhythm, Richards said. But he added that the case isn’t clear proof that the Taser was the cause of the change, which might also have been the result of his treatment with a beta blocker or may simply have occurred spontaneously.

Peter Holran, Taser’s vice president for public relations, told the Health Blog that there are many possible causes for converting from atrial fibrillation to a normal rhythm. “The timing could suggest that there were some effects of the electric shock, but we just don’t see that in any other studies,” he said. Holran added that the company’s scientific advisory board is reviewing the case report.