AJC Atlanta Hawks center Jason Collier was already dead when the ambulance pulled into the emergency area at Northside Hospital Forsyth early Saturday; a 28-year-old victim of a mysterious heart attack that struck in the middle of the night. Forsyth County Coroner Lauren McDonald, who was at the hospital when the ambulance arrived, said Collier's wife, Katie, told him he woke up with chest pains and shortness of breath around 3:30 a.m. "He woke up, told her he was having difficulty breathing," McDonald said. "She asked him if he wanted her to call 911, and he said 'yes.' Katie started CPR until the EMS got there. They tried for 20 minutes to get a rhythm, but couldn't." No one knows yet why a man in his prime ? a 7-foot-tall professional athlete with no known history of heart disease ? would suffer a cardiac arrest. The body was transferred to the state Medical Examiner's Office in Decatur, where an autopsy was performed late Saturday. Results might not be known for several days. Emory University cardiologist and professor, Dr. Steven Manoukian, said most likely the young man had a blockage in an artery; very rare in people Collier's age or athletic condition. It's also possible Collier had an irregular heartbeat or cardiomyopathy, either an abnormal weakness or thickening of the heart muscle, or a blood clot in his lungs. Some very large men have a condition called Marfan syndrome, a change in the way proteins make up the walls of arteries, which can lead to too much stretching and sometimes, rupture. Dr. Winston Gandy of St. Joseph's Hospital in Atlanta, a board member of the American Heart Association, said when most people complain of chest pain or shortness of breath, "the most common thing we think of is coronary artery disease. In a young athletic person, one thinks of an aeortic aneuysm, an enlarged aorta. That can result in a tear known as aerotic dissection. Such tears can . . . cause sudden death that way." Source
