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More on Benoit - his heart wasn't the only enlarged organ in his body according to his official autopsy report

Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero had a matching set of enlarged organs at the time of their death.  (Wikimedia Commons)
Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero had a matching set of enlarged organs at the time of their death. (Wikimedia Commons)

Here's the latest fallout from the new information that came out about Chris Benoit and his murder suicide on Wednesday:

  • On the December 23rd Wrestling Observer radio show, Dave Meltzer confirmed that the news about Chris Benoit's enlarged heart came from Dr. Bennet Omalu's recent article on his Benoit brain research in the Journal of Forensic Nursing entitled "Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a professional American wrestler", which Jerry McDevitt made sure to send to Irv Muchnick as an attachment to his nasty legal letter.
  • Meltzer went on to claim that the reason that this news took so long to come out was that he was misled at the time of his death by Chris Benoit's medical examiners:  "I just think that the coroner was really, I don't know if he was pressured by outside forces to say or not say certain things, but I mean the only thing that he would say is that he had the endocrine system issues, you know where he was not producing enough testosterone, which was well known.  And that was the only thing wrong and everything else, all of his organs and everything were fine, and it comes out that he had the same heart damage as Hawk, Eddie Guerrero, Davey Boy Smith, these kind of guys."
  • Bryan Alvarez speculated that the "outside forces" that wanted this information suppressed was WWE.  You don't say!  I mean WWE has never employed a dead wrestler's widow and asked them to seal his official autopsy report.  
  • Meltzer claimed that Benoit didn't have other enlarged organs (incorrectly as it turns out) or the thinning of the walls (i.e. atherosclerosis) like Eddie Guerrero had, so Benoit wasn't a heart attack waiting to happen like Eddie was.
  • Irv Muchnick in his response to Meltzer's newsletter article on Benoit's enlarged heart helpfully published online Chris Benoit's official autopsy report, which was originally released by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation on August 27th 2007.  On page 1 of 5, Final Diagnosis, point III clearly states that Benoit had cardiomegaly and dilatation (620 grams), ie. an enlarged heart.  It's really amazing that despite being misled by the medical examiners, no-one picked up on this in the professional wrestling media long before Omalu's research article on Benoit was publicised by McDevitt, because it is in the official autopsy report that the media should have obtained a copy of and read in full.  Moreover, what no-one in the professional wrestling media has picked up on until now is Final Diagnosis, point III A, which states that Benoit also had congestive hepatomegaly (2620 grams) and splenomegaly (300 grams), i.e. an enlarged liver and spleen, which wasn't made clear in the aforementioned research article by Dr. Bennet Omalu.

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