Public interest in cardiac arrest in the United States following Damar Hamlin’s injury on Monday night football

Objectives: During a National Football League (NFL) game on Monday, January 2, 2023, a 24-year-old athlete, Damar Hamlin, experienced cardiac arrest after a tackle on the field. Experts are suggesting this event was caused by commotio cordis, a condition where blunt force trauma disrupts the electrical activity of the heart. Due to rapid response by team medical staff, including cardiopulmonary resuscitation and the use of an external defibrillator, Hamlin survived this episode and has had positive clinical outcomes. Thus, our primary objective was to quantify the degree of which this episode triggered public interest in cardiac arrest, commotio cordis, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Study Design: We performed a temporal analysis of search query volume of the Google search engine via Google Trends (trends.google.com).

Methods: Google Trends was used to extract daily search interest related to topics of “cardiac arrest,” and “cardiopulmonary resuscitation” and injury of “commotio cordis” within the United States for a 90-day time frame from October 12, 2022, through January 8, 2023. Search interest from Google Trends is reported as relative search interest (RSI) on a scale from 0-100—where 100 is the peak interest within the searched timeframe. Dates that resulted in RSI < 1 were imputed as 0.5. We constructed an auto-regressive integrated moving algorithm (ARIMA) to project search interest for each of these topics if the injury to Damar Hamlin had not occurred. From this model, we compare the forecasted values to the actual values to determine the increase in RSI immediately following the injury.

Results: RSI for ‘cardiac arrest’, ‘cardiopulmonary resuscitation’, and ‘commotio cordis’ each peaked (RSI=100) on January 4, 2023—the day following the injury to Damar Hamlin (the game was scheduled Monday night). The forecasted RSI for ‘cardiac arrest’ on this day was 0.99 (0.04-1.94)—a difference in RSI of 99.01, which was 10,023.46% increase above the expected value. The forecasted value for ‘cardiopulmonary resuscitation’ on this day was 3.99 (2.03-5.95)—an increase for the actual value of 2,407.65%. The term ‘commotio cordis’ had relatively little prior RSI to this specific injury resulting in a forecasted value for January 4, 2023, of 0.11 (-0.30-0.53). The peak of 100 for the RSI of ‘commotio cordis’ was an 87,268.42% increase.

Conclusion: Through Damar Hamlin’s unfortunate cardiac arrest, which occurred during a televised NFL game, followed by immediate mass media attention, public interest in cardiac arrest, commotio cordis, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation increased as evidenced by our results. Increased interest in these topics could advance interest in cardiac arrest prevention and increase effectiveness of bystander interventions, such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation.