In Italy, a 78 -year -old man, said dead after being the victim of a heart accident, reopened thirty minutes later.
A extremely rare phenomenon which, medically speaking, indeed bears a name: “The Lazarus phenomenon”. A term that describes the return of the vascular function after the failure of an attempt at resuscitation.
Victim of cardiac arrest in Italy
The facts happened in Italy in Marina Velca, a hamlet of the city of Tarquinia. A 78 -year -old man was declared dead after being the victim of a heart accident, report RTL Belga and several other media like the local Italian daily Corriere Di Viterbo.
He opened his eyes
On the spot, the emergency services provided first aid and tried to revive the victim. In vain. While the hearse was expected on the spot, suddenly, the victim opened his eyes, asking for his daughters. He was immediately transported to the hospital where he was taken care of. By observation, the septuagenarian would be out of danger.
This is not the first time that this kind of situation has happened. In France, in 2022, in Seine-Saint-Denis, a garbage collector had been declared dead after a cardiac discomfort. However, his heart had ended up restarting. He had nevertheless remained in a coma.
“An extremely rare phenomenon”
As the world reports, the spontaneous return of traffic after a cardiac arrest bears the name of “Lazarus phenomenon”, in reference “to the biblical character Lazare de Bethany.
Still according to our colleagues, “the first cases were described in “The Lancet “in January and May 1982, both by a team from Helsinki (Finland) and internist doctors of the Dreux hospital center”. It was in 1993 that the term “Lazarus phenomenon” was used for the first time an American anesthesiologist and emergency artist, Jack G. Bray, in an article published in the journal “Anesthesiology”.
“In 2014, a study listed only 49 cases of Lazarus in the international medical literature. In 2018, ten other cases were identified”.
This phenomenon remains largely misunderstood by modern medicine and raises many questions. The Lazarus phenomenon describes the spontaneous return of vital signs after cardiac arrest. While resuscitation attempts do not lead to immediate recovery, however, it sometimes happens that the heart suddenly resumes its normal activity without obvious cause.