LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog
Just when you thought your brain could unwind on a Friday, you realise that it would rather be challenged with some good old fashioned medical trivia FFFF…introducing Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 211 – the spooky halloween edition.
Question 1
+ Reveal the Funtabulous Answer
- Yes, there are multiple media reports of young people dying from “Sudden sniffing death”
- The proposed mechanism is a catecholamine surge when teenagers are caught e.g. by parents shouting “what are you doing”. The already sensitised myocardium from the inhalants then has a second hit of catecholamines resulting in an arrhythmia and potential death. [Reference]
Question 2
According to a BMJ paper what disease do you have if you are experiencing the following: “a shambling gait, tendency to moan, loss of dexterity and prior personality traits, and the eventual rotting of flesh”?
+ Reveal the Funtabulous Answer
- Zombieism
- The detailed paper talks about the epidemiology, treatment and prevention including a historical perspective to the 1500’s when Haitian zombies (best described) were often thought to be controlled by practitioners of voodoo. They may have been created via a neurotoxin, typically described as tetrodotoxin, which puts the victim in a sleep-like state. [Reference]
Question 3
+ Reveal the funtabulous answer!
- Possibly, various mathematical models exist
- The Buffy model: both populations could exist in harmony if vampire numbers were kept static by a sufficient number of vampire slayers.
- Dracula model: No slayers, Dracula feeds every 4-5 days and their victims turns into a vampire, results in no humans would be in existence by day 153 and then eventually all the vampires would die out.
- A more romantic model like the “Vampire Chronicles” where there are no slayers, vampires only need a little blood, low rates of conversion and occasionally a human is turned into a vampire would lead to extinction in 48.7 years.
- A Twilight model: where vampires co-exist, drink the blood of animals, occasionally humans and converting a human into a vampire takes extreme effort. Well, yes symbiosis is possible but once one population’s growth declines we could again be taken over by vampires. [Reference]
Question 4
+ Reveal the Funtabulous Answer
- It all depends on your faith
- Walter Cannon wrote in 1942 about a number of historical cases whereby people knew they were cursed and deeply believed they were going to die. A number of hypotheses exist, the most popular includes the subject’s belief they are going to die along with a community acting as if this were also the case. The patient then becomes so terrified they inadvertently cause a “state of shock” lower their blood pressure and develop end organ damage. [Reference]
- In World War II there are also reported cases of soldiers with minimal injuries dying days later who appeared to be in some kind of petrified catatonic state.
Question 5
+ Reveal the Funtabulous Answer
- Harry Houdini from a ruptured appendix.
- See reference for last years halloween FFFFs [Reference]
Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 211
Neil Long
This post first appeared on LITFL: Life In The Fast Lane Medical, please read the originial post: here
