hot dog
In this photo, a plate of hot dogs sits on a table at the annual Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on July 4, 2005. Getty Images

A nine-year-old Turkish boy suffered a cardiac arrest Wednesday after taking a bite of a hot dog and swallowing a mouthful of the sausage along with a piece of bread. However, the condition did not arise because the boy choked, but it triggered a rare heart condition, according to a case study published on Wednesday in the journal Pediatrics.

The boy was at his school when he fainted. The incident had a much more unlikely cause than just choking, Dr. Isa Ozyilmaz of Mehmet Akif Ersoy Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery Training and Research Hospital in Istanbul, the lead author of the case study.

He was rushed to a local hospital and further tests revealed he had a rare heart condition known as Brugada syndrome which can lead to sudden death. A piece of hot dog that he consumed caused his vagus nerve, which assists heart and gastrointestinal function, to change his heart beat. The vagus nerve runs all the way down from the brain to the gut and helps both your heart and digestive system to function properly.

"Brugada syndrome is an inherited (heart) rhythm problem," said Dr. Anne Dubin, a professor of pediatric cardiology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford told CNN, who was not involved in the Turkish boy's case on Wednesday.

"Patients with Brugada Syndrome develop ventricular tachycardia, a condition where the heart beats too quickly to maintain normal blood flow. Brugada Syndrome is rare. Although the number of patients with the condition is difficult to measure, approximately 4 out of 1,000 people in the United States have ECG findings of Brugada Syndrome," according to a paper on the syndrome by the Stanford Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease.

The Brugada syndrome is said to be extremely rare and takes time to be diagnosed. Some of its signs and symptoms, according to the Medscape website, include:

  • Syncope and cardiac arrest, which might be the most common. It might occur during your sleep or rest
  • Nightmares or beating something at night
  • Associated atrial fibrillation (20%)- an irregular, often rapid heart rate that commonly causes poor blood flow
  • Sometimes the patient might get fever and then the other symptoms manifest

Dr. Dubin told CNN that the problem "can lead to abnormal heart rhythms in the lower chambers of the heart that can be associated with sudden death."

In the case of this Turkish boy, he was fortunately resuscitated and then some follow-up tests revealed he had the rare, genetic heart condition.

Dubin specified that majority of people are not aware of the condition until later in life. The majority of people who develop symptoms of Brugada syndrome are already "in their 20s up to 50s or 60s," Dubin said.

If the condition is discovered in parents, doctors also screen their children, even those without symptoms, and in some cases, they might discover it then. "And then you have to decide what to do with them," said Dubin.

"As far as symptomatic Brugada syndrome, I have been practicing pediatric electrophysiology for 23 years now, and I have probably seen two to three cases of it," she said.

This might be a rare condition, but parents must be careful of hot dogs as a choking hazard. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, hot dogs are the top cause leading to food-related choking in children below the age of three.

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