Natasha Richardson’s Cause of Death: Blunt Impact to Head
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Natasha Richardson & Liam Neeson
The Chief Medical Examiner of New York conducted an autopsy Thursday, ruled that actress Natasha Richardson, 45, died of a blunt impact to the head.
The medical examiner’s spokeswoman Ellen Borakove stated that the death was ruled an accident, and the cause was epidural hematoma, bleeding between the skull and the brain’s covering.
Richardson’s family announced her death on Wednesday, two days after she fell on the beginners slope at Canada’s Mont Tremblant ski resort, about 80 miles northwest of Montreal.
Richardson died in New York, after being transported Tuesday from Canada to Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital.
Richardson’s brain injury most likely occurred as a result of a skull fracture, says Stewart Levy, a neurosurgeon who practices at St. Anthony Central Hospital in Denver. Richardson was not wearing a helmet when she fell.
The ambulance company that serves the ski resort told Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper that paramedics were turned away when they responded to the initial call after Richardson’s fall.
Yves Coderre, director of operations at Ambulances Radisson, told the newspaper that ski patrollers summoned help, and when the medical workers arrived, they were told they were not needed. “They never saw the patient,” Coderre said. “So they turned around.”
Resort spokeswoman Catherine Lacasse told the Associated Press on Tuesday that Richardson said she seemed fine at first. “An hour later, she said she didn’t feel well. She had a headache, so we sent her to the hospital.”
Neurosurgeon Levy says that initially there’s little brain damage. It’s a well-known “lucid interval,” he says.
A “fair-sized” epidural hematoma would be about 3 ounces of blood, says Eugene Flamm, chair of neurosurgery at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. The skull can’t expand to accommodate the fluid, and the hematoma presses down on the brain, Flamm says. That can cause the upper part to slip toward the brain stem, which controls such vital functions as breathing.
Older people have more space between the skull and the dura. But “in a younger person, a small clot will do more harm,” Flamm says.
Flamm and Levy say an epidural hematoma is easy to diagnose on a CT scan, and neurosurgeons usually treat it by cutting out part of the skull to remove the excess blood. It isn’t known whether Richardson had the surgery.
“This is a very treatable condition if you’re aware of what the problem is and the patient is quickly transferred to a hospital,” Keith Siller of New York University Langone Medical Center told the Associated Press.
Borakove told the Associated Press that funeral arrangements will be handled by the Greenwich Village Funeral Home, and further details were released.
