The Charleston County Coroner's office has released the cause of death for a 15-year-old student, who died after he was found unconscious in a middle school restroom nine weeks ago.
Officials say Thaddeus Calvary died from a disease called Lymphocytic Myocarditis, an infection in the heart muscle. It caused a fatal irregular heart beat.
Thaddeus Calvary was an eighth grader at St. Andrews Middle school. He died May 10th, after he was found unconscious in a school restroom.
Dr. Lars Runquist, an interventional cardiologist at Coastal Cardiology says the disease can develop in otherwise healthy people, after a viral infection. Dr. Runquist says, "This is a very rare illness. Lymphocetic Myocarditis is an infection where you have an inflammatory response involving the heart muscle itself. It's difficult, very difficult to diagnosis. Unfortunately in an acute situation, it's usually diagnosed at autopsy. The only way to prove myocadarditis is by by cardiac biopsy which we sometimes do. Classically the presentation is people have a mild viral like flu like illness, not a very impressive infection, but this is followed by shortness of breath, swelling, and chess pain, and typical patients will come in, and in the work up, they see signs of congestive heart failure. That's when they are identified as having some sort of cardiac illness in an otherwise healthy person that you would not expect to have heart disease." Dr. Runquist says it's also difficult to determine the cause of the infection. He says, "We don't really know. There are not very good tests for viral illnesses. It's a disease state that's the result of an infection with multiple causes." Dr. Runquist says right now, there's no way to prevent the disease. He says, "There's no prevention for it and the main is supportive care. There have been some studies trying to identify treatments such as using steroids and other agents that have not shown in any benefit, typically it's bed rest and treating heart failure symptoms. Most patients do get better, but there are the rare situations where people get acutely sick, and you can see death even in young people like in this case."
The coroner's office says Calvary was otherwise healthy and no drugs were found in his system.
Aurvella Calvary, Thaddeus' stepmother says, the family is relieved to finally know the cause of death. They're comforted to know that it was something that he or someone else didn't cause, and that drugs were not involved.
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