House: Mysterious Heart Attack in 10-Year-Old Girl

Sarah Pollock

October 11, 2013

BIOL 1230-51

Fall ’13 Semester

House: Mysterious Heart Attack in 10-year-old Girl

I chose to use the medical drama called “House”. This Television show is focused around the difficult to diagnosis and sometimes, bizarre cases, encountered by Dr. House and his team. The episode called “Heavy” follows a case of a 10-year-old obese girl who has a heart attack at school during gym class. House and the medical team try to find the cause of this rare occurrence. In the meantime, her health becomes progressively worse causing other conditions and the team need to figure out the etiology and diagnosis before her health continues to dwindle.

The episode begins before the girl went to school where she was complaining of chest pain to her mother, but was not taken as something serious. Once she was in gym class and doing physical activity, she collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. An EKG was done and found that she had a myocardial infarction. Her other symptoms included fatigue, myalgia, and hypertension. The team of doctors discuss what could possible cause a heart attack in a 10-year-old girl and many of them continued to point towards causation of her morbid obesity. Her mother claimed that this could not be true, as the girl eat right, exercises every day, and has gone to see numerous nutritionists. The doctors chose to follow their theories on the obesity and run tests for a metabolic syndrome. During the test, the girl became delirious and full of rage and the doctors had to sedate her. They believed that this temporary psychosis could only be due to hypoglycemia. The doctors proceeded with blood tests to prove this, but to their surprise, the labs came back negative for hypoglycemia, bringing them back to square one. The doctors contemplated different theories on what could cause temporary psychosis and a myocardial infarction in a 10-year-old girl, leading them to the only reasonable explanation that the girl was taking...