Don’t Lose Your Heart to a Car. Extracorporeal Ejection of the Heart by Forceful Upward Thoraco-abdominal Blunt Trauma in Human and Animal.

Abstract

The traumatic extracorporeal ejection of a beating heart has not been witnessed and reported in the literature previously, to our knowledge. Here we present two cases of vehicle accidents leading to this fatal injury, both in a rabbit and a human. Case 1. One late evening in June, in the land of the midnight sun, a young man was driving to his favourite fishing river for a spot of trout fishing in a remote part of Eastern Finland. While driving his aged Nissan Almera at 60 km/h down a dusty gravel road on this dusky night, suddenly a young male rabbit jumped onto the road and appeared in the beam of his headlights. Despite the man’s evasive manoeuvres, the rabbit was struck by the left front corner of the car. After hitting the brakes and the car eventually coming to a standstill, the young man went to inspect the animal he had hit…. In conclusion, we present that in a very rare constellation of forceful blunt trauma to the chest, the heart can be completely avulsed and ejected from the body in human as in animals. Larger prospective and randomised studies are probably not needed to confirm these findings. Just be careful – it is possible to lose your heart to a car.

Keywords

• extracorporeal ejection
• avulsion
• heart
• blunt thorachoabdominal trauma
• rupture
• aorta