Triggering of Sudden Death — Lessons from an Earthquake

At 4:31 a.m. on January 17, 1994, a violent earthquake centered near Northridge, California, suddenly awakened millions of citizens of Los Angeles and subjected them to intense fright. The earthquake not only caused deaths from trauma, as would be expected, but also was associated with an unusually large number of deaths from atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.1 In the two years since then, Leor et al. have sifted through the medical data and unearthed information of great importance to our understanding of sudden death from cardiac causes, the leading cause of death in developed countries.2 Using the earthquake as a natural experiment, . . .