STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- The popular young cricketer was hit in a freak accident
- The ball struck him in the neck, below his helmet and outside his face guard
- A critical artery was crushed, causing massive bleeding
- The same thing can happen in car crashes or strangulation
Hughes was wearing a
helmet, but in a freak combination of circumstances, his head was turned
away from the ball as it bounced up to him.
The ball came up below
his helmet, outside his face guard, hitting him in a sensitive part of
the neck. It smashed the critical vertebral artery, which carries blood
from the heart up into the head.
"That caused the artery to split and for bleeding to go up into the brain," Australian team doctor Peter Bruckner said. "And he had a massive bleed into his brain."
While it's incredibly
rare for such a thing to happen on a sports field, the injury is not
that uncommon in some car crashes, medical literature suggests --
perhaps occurring in 1% to 3% of accidents. Other blunt trauma to the
neck, or strangulation, can cause the same damage.
It's even possible for
the artery to split with no obvious immediate injury, in what
specialists call "spontaneous vertebral artery dissection."
If that happens, it can
be less obviously traumatic than what happened to Hughes, leading to a
slow leak rather than the massive bleeding that killed the athlete.
About one or 1.5 people in 100,000 suffer spontaneous vertebral artery dissection every year, a review of the literature suggests.
It's among the leading causes of strokes in people ages 45 and younger, the study finds.
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