You want to know what happened to Elvis? I'll tell you what happened. I had to know, man. That was one of his

arm. I mean, man, I was on his side. He made us feel all right.

Last week, we ruled out amphetamines as a direct cause of Elvis Presley's untimely death at the age of 42.

Although he was a lifelong user of these dopaminergic drugs, he did not have them in his system at the time of his death.

Instead, he had opioids and sedatives, mainly barbiturates and benzos, but did Elvis die of a

sedative opioid overdose?

Elvis did have a history of drug overdoses.

In the four years before his death in 1977, he had four accidental overdoses, mainly on barbiturates, one of which put him in a three-day

coma. Opioids and sedatives caused death by stopping respiration, and Elvis's multiple health

problems, particularly COPD, put him at greater risk but respiratory suppression. But several teams of forensic pathologists have investigated his death,

including one by the former president of the American Pathology Association,

and their findings point to sudden death from a heart attack,

not the slower death of respiratory suppression.

The details are a little beyond the scope here. This is a

psychiatry podcast, but they have to do with the timing of rigormortus and cellular changes

in the organs. So far, everything points to a heart attack caused by a sudden arrhythmia,

something the king was already at risk for because he had an enlarged heart,

or hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Stimulant use and poor diet may have worsened his cardiac health,

but hypertropic cardiomyopathy is largely a genetic disorder that follows pretty straightforward Mendelian inheritance.

That's a rarity in medicine.

It is an autosomal dominant gene, which means you only need to inherit one copy of the gene

for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy to develop the disease.

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