Originally Posted by fmichael

Dear Karen -

I beg to quibble ever so slightly. I got CRPS/RSD in 2001. Three years later, at age 51 and without any (other) risk factors, I had a 100% occlusion of the mid LAD artery in my heart. In fact, it took some time to get a diagnosis of my chest pains because I had had a "clean" thalium (chemically induced) stress test six months before, which my internist has all of his post 45 patients do every few years. That and a routine CT calcium calcification scan in or around 2002 put me at a "zero risk" of developing coronary artery disease (CAD). The only thing that saved my life was that I was at that point generally in good enough shape that I had excellent "collateral blood flow" across the heart. Consequently, I had only minimal damage, and most of that tissue turned out to have gone into suspended animation and has since come back, with the aid of a stent and a lifetime supply of Plavix.

I've since learned that one of the things that CRPS does in the brain is trigger the production of a number of proinflamatory cytokines, specifically a bad boy called Interleukin-6 (IL6), which longitudinal studies (available on request) have shown to be the single most effective predictor of death from CAD: basically, the higher the blood levels of IL6, the greater ease with which platlets and the like bind to artery walls.

Now, you say that the RSD caused your friend's death (for which I am truly sorry for you) but it did not kill her, the heart attack did.

We could be splitting hairs here on causality, but look at it this way, if it would be harder to buy life insurance because you have CRPS and the insurance companies knew - from an actuarial perspective - that people with CRPS tend to die somewhat more often because of heart attacks, it seems to me perfectly reasonable to say the the RSD killed them, abeit through a multi-step process. It's not just a matter of risk, or if it is, when it happened to me, it was the only risk facto I had. Adopting the lawyers' "but for" [it would not have happened] standard, the RSD did it.

Mike