A 16-year-old boy from Chapin, South Carolina suffered a caffeine induced cardiac event last month after consuming three caffeinated beverages within a two-hour time frame.
Davis Allen Cripe drank a McDonald’s cafe latte, a large Diet Mountain Dew and an energy drink just before his passing. An autopsy revealed that Davis had no undiagnosed heart conditions and wasn’t under the influence of drugs or alcohol. He was healthy before suffering from an arrhythmia, otherwise known as an abnormal heart rhythm, according to Richland County coroner Gary Watts at a press conference Monday. Watts stressed the influencing factor of caffeine on the teenage boy’s death.
“The purpose here today is not to slam Mountain Dew. It’s not to slam cafe lattes, it’s not to slam energy drinks,” he said. “But what we want to do is make people understand that these drinks, this amount of caffeine, how it’s ingested, can have dire consequences, and that’s what happened in this case.”
Richland County Deputy Chief medical examiner Dr. Amy Durso claimed the boy’s death was caused by the amount of caffeine Davis drank as well as the short time span he consumed it.
“A cup of coffee, a can of soda isn’t going to cause this kind of thing,” she told reporters. “It’s the amount and the time frame in which these caffeinated beverages are consumed that can put you at risk, for anybody really, and that could cause sudden arrhythmia and in rare cases, such as this one, can cause death.”
Davis’s heartbroken father, Sean Cripe spoke at the press conference. He discussed his son’s strong will against drugs and alcohol. But, in the end, it was a legal substance readily available to people of all ages that contributed to his death.
“I stand before you as a brokenhearted father and hope that something good can come from this,” he said. “Parents, please, talk to your kids about the dangers of these energy drinks. And teenagers and students, please stop buying them. There’s no reason to consume them. They can be very dangerous.”
Dr. Marcie Schneider, who co-authored a 2011 clinical report on children and adolescents’ consumption of sports drinks and energy drinks, agreed with Davis’s father’s notion of the dangers of energy drinks. Schneider believes the consumption of an energy drink greatly attributed to the teenager’s death, warning that the combination of ingredients found in some energy drinks can prove to be harmful or fatal. She even thinks there should be age regulations for buying such drinks.
“In an energy drink, there’s much more than caffeine. They have all these other ingredients ― like taurine, that acts like caffeine, [and] guarana, which actually potentiates caffeine,” she said. “I’m concerned with caffeine for sure, but at least with coffee, I sort of know what I’m getting: water and caffeine.”
