As a rule I don’t read the news any longer. I’ve been an avid consumer of the news most of my life, but a few years ago came to the realisation that it wasn’t doing me any good. It’s almost always bad, often sensationalist opinion rather than the reporting of fact, and written in such a way as to encourage clicks or fix your eyeballs on it. I don’t want to be ignorant of the world, but at the same time checking a news app each day was harming my mental health more than any benefit I was getting. However of course I’ll become aware of some stories in other ways, friends and colleagues talking and so on (and I do allow myself a peek at them if I really can’t help myself, I never said I was perfect!). And so it was that I heard Ozzy Osbourne had died. Hailing from his neck of the woods, although I never really liked that genre of rock music (I was a teenager in the early 90s and preferred indie music at the time) I couldn’t help but keep tabs on him over the years. We never had MTV growing up, but whenever I went to friends’ houses that did, I loved watching the Osbournes. There simply wasn’t anything like it at the time.
When I heard he had died, I assumed he had died of Parkinson’s disease, but as it turns out he actually died of a cardiac arrest following a heart attack.
As a quick aside, let’s just pause to check the terminology here, as people commonly confuse those two things. A cardiac arrest is where the heart suddenly stops functioning, usually associated with a very fast heart rhythm called a ventricular arrhythmia. There are many causes of a cardiac arrest, and it is nearly always fatal. Even if it occurs in a hospital setting, the vast majority of patients do not survive. That said, although they are vastly outnumbered by those that die, thankfully we always see some patients who have survived a cardiac arrest through prompt cardiac resuscitation (please learn the basics!). A heart attack however is most commonly caused by a blocked heart artery. How quickly a patient can get to a hospital and get this unblocked determines how much damage occurs, and can vary from zero, to severe heart failure. Not everyone however is lucky enough to get to hospital in the first place, and in around half of cases of a heart attack, it causes a cardiac arrest and the person sadly dies, just like Ozzy.
When a person dies, a doctor has to fill in a death certificate outlining the cause of death, any contributing illnesses and so on. I must have filled hundreds if not more of these in my time. There is a space on the form to put ‘deceased’s occupation’. Oftentimes actually this information is not easily available to the hospital doctor doing the form (and I suspect with the move away from named GPs to individual patients over the last 20 years means the same may be true in the community) and so doctors write ‘retired’, because of course the vast majority of people who die are that. Not in Ozzy’s case though, whose doctor wrote ‘Occupation – Songwriter, Performer, and Rock Legend’ which I rather love!
Ozzy died at age 76, and it got me thinking, I wonder what odds one would have given him of making 76 when he was in his 40s? He freely admitted to a long history of smoking, alcohol, cocaine and other prescription drugs. His Black Sabbath bandmate Tony Lommi said although they all lived badly, Ozzy lived the worst of them all. Many a show was cancelled in the 1970s as his voice just wasn’t up to it the morning after the night before.
In many ways then, it’s astonishing that he made it to 76. Medicine is often about statistics. I of course don’t want the take away message from this blog to be ‘it’s ok to lead a really unhealthy life, as it’s not as bad as Ozzy’s was and he still got to 76’, but it’s fine to acknowledge that there will be people who seem to get away with bad lifestyles more than others. I’ve seen marathon runners who have never smoked in their lives have heart attacks in their 30s. Only on Friday I saw a 42 year old man who had a heart attack and needed a stent fitted whose only risk factor was being overweight.
It happens. No-one has a crystal ball, but we can massively stack the odds in our favour with respect to reducing the odds of dying from cardiovascular disease. The very fact that you are reading this singles you out as someone who is interested in this. If you haven’t already, why not check out some of my videos and posts on preventative cardiology, helping you make better lifestyle choices, you can find them here
RIP Ozzy