Sudden unexpected death in young adult due to right ventricular dysplasia.

This case report illustrates a rare familial cardiomyopathy first reported in the medical literature in 1982 known as right ventricular dysplasia (right ventricular cardiomyopathy). The patient is a young woman with a history of cardiac arrhythmias suspected to be associated with prolapsed mitral valve who presented to the Berks Country Coroner's office as a sudden unexpected death in a young adult. It is important to recognize the illustrated classic cardiac pathology of this rare entity for clinical management, as an anatomic explanation of cause of sudden death and for the accumulation of statistics to establish frequency, conditions of predisposition, response to therapy and predicted outcome.