6 year old Vincent Groetzner dies because of hyperthermia

Vincent Groetzner, a six years old boy from Florida, was enjoying his summer vacation in his pool when he suddenly started feeling bad and his legs began to hurt.

He started sweating heavily, his heart began to beat very fast and within hours the boy’s vital organs failed and the doctors pronounced him dead although his mother made desperate efforts to keep him alive. The doctors are trying to find out if the boy suffered from malignant hyperthermia, a rare hereditary disorder that affects only about 1,000 people each year, and his mother hopes that the medical investigations might help save Vincent’s three brothers and other children from a similar situation. The most cases of the heredity disorder mostly appear when the patient is undergoing surgery because it erupts as a reaction to general anesthesia, but this was not Vincent’s case, he was playing when he started feeling ill. Dr. Henry Rosenberg, an anesthesiologist and president of the Malignant Hyperthermia Association of the United States, wants to research what happened to Vincent and to determine what other causes may lead to the disorder’s appearance besides the reaction to the anesthetic. For many years this syndrome has been related to the operating room and the patients who suffer malignant hyperthermia during surgery are given a drug that will reverse the condition and save the patient’s life.

Over the past few years, there were cases of patients who have developed a condition resembling malignant hyperthermia unrelated to a surgery or an operating room. Lisa Groetzner, Vincent’s mother, said that the boy was not suffering of any disease and that his death came as a shock to the whole family. According to her, Vincent accused a headache before going to a friend’s house in their neighborhood, but she supposed that it was before he did not wear his glasses again. But Vincent arrived back home just 20 minutes after leaving, brought by one of the neighbors. He said to her that something was wrong with him, that he could not bend his legs and that he felt that his heart was pounding out of his chest. Groetzner drove him to hospital and he kept telling her on the way that he could not open his mouth and he started foaming around his mouth. The doctors said that his temperature reached 107 degrees, but his autopsy report did not show any evidence of malignant hyperthermia, so the cause of death was could not be established. They found an undiagnosed neuromuscular disorder and hyperlordosis, a muscular deformation that manifests to babies under the form of an exaggerated arched back. Groetzner had visited many doctors to find what the cause for the boy’s deformity was and she wonders now if this was the cause of his death. Dr. Henry Rosenberg agrees with her to some extent and says that among the large number of muscle disorders there are a few that can be linked to malignant hyperthermia. She says that parents concerned about this disease should keep their children away from extreme heat, especially if one member of their family had a bad reaction to general anesthesia or suddenly died. The tests for identifying malignant hyperthermia are not complete and are also very expensive, so patients that are not clearly predisposed to the disease will probably not do them. Ever since Vincent died Groetzner has been trying to find out what was the disease that killed him, because if Vincent suffered from malignant hyperthermia, there is a 50 percent chance that her other two children might develop it, too.