A 48-year-old Italian man is alive after getting into a violent motorcycle accident, but somehow ended up with his heart rotating 90 degrees in his chest, doctors said Wednesday.
The unidentified man was being treated in a hospital emergency room when doctors noticed his heart was not in the right place while listening to its rhythms, Live Science reported. Doctors performed an X-ray and CT scan on the man's chest to discover the source of the abnormality. The results showed his heart had rotated 90 degrees to the right.
"This is a very interesting anatomical finding, and it's very unusual," Dr. Gregory Fontana, department of cardiothoracic surgery chairman at Lenox Hill Hospital, who was not involved with the patient, told Live Science.
Fontana said he is shocked the man survived the case, the likes of which he had never seen before.
"What's unique about the case is the way the heart rotated so far in the other direction, and the patient was still awake and alert," the doctor continued.
The twisted heart is believed to be a result of lung injuries the man sustained in the accident. Air in the man's lungs began to leak, the pressure of which built up in his chest and pushed his heart to the right, doctors wrote in a Wednesday report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The man's blood pressure then began to drop because the rotated heart was cutting off his blood vessels.
The man also suffered a ruptured spleen and broken ribs as a result of the accident.
Doctors were able to de-rotate the patient's heart by draining the air from his chest. After 24 hours, his heart was in the right position, the report said. The heart remained uninjured.
"It's an amazing thing about medicine," Fontana told Live Science. "There are so many things we haven't seen yet, and will see in the future with great fascination."
