Michael Jackson Dies Of Cardiac Arrest

June 25, 2009 -- Pop star Michael Jackson has died at age 50 after suffering a cardiac arrest, according to media reports.

Los Angeles TV station KTLA reports that Los Angeles fire officials said they responded to a 911 call at Jackson's home and that Jackson wasn't breathing when they arrived; paramedics performed CPR and rushed him to UCLA Medical Center, although the hospital, due to privacy rules, could not confirm that.

In a cardiac arrest, the heart stops working properly. A cardiac arrest is not the same as a heart attack, but it can happen because of a heart attack, notes Douglas Zipes, MD, MACC, distinguished professor at Indiana University School of Medicine and past president of the American College of Cardiology.

Zipes explains that "cardiac arrest is a heart rhythm disturbance when the bottom chamber of the heart, the ventricles, beat an at extremely rapid rate -- 4 to 600 times a minute."

Zipes says that heart rhythm "prevents that bottom chamber from effective contraction and pumping blood to the brain and to the rest of the body, and death results if it's not reversed within four or five minutes, generally."

According to his doctor and other physicians, when that heart rhythm disturbance, which is called ventricular fibrillation, happens, the bottom chambers of the heart are "like a bag of squiggly worms without an effective squeeze, and no blood gets pumped to the rest of the body, and without the necessary oxygen in the blood vessels going to the brain, and so on, the brain then begins to die."

Though the family is requesting another autopsy.

Rest in peace michael.