Queen’s graduate on how Elvis Presley really died 

08 September 2015

(Based on an article by Claire McNeilly, first published in the Belfast Telegraph on 04 Sept)

A Queen’s graduate from Northern Ireland has been credited with establishing the exact cause of Elvis Presley's death, finally putting to rest the conspiracy theories about how world-famous singer died.

Professor Stephen Kingsmore's revolutionary DNA-based findings from last year are now being accepted in medical circles as the definitive explanation as to why the 'The King' died prematurely, aged just 42, in August 1977.

Dr Kingsmore, who graduated from Queen's with a MB ChB BAO BSc in 1985 and a DSc in Systems Biology in 2010, is a renowned geneticist and Executive Director of Medical Panomics at Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics in Kansas City, Missouri.

The former Craigavon Hospital intern returned to Ireland at the beginning of September to address the Irish Society of Human Genetics Annual Scientific Meeting held at Dublin City University. And speaking to Channel 4's Dead Famous DNA programme he said that the Presley results indicated it would be unfair to blame the singer's lifestyle for his death.

"There has been so much speculation about cause of death, and so much ill spoken of his lifestyle, and we had this intriguing finding that possibly Elvis had a medical illness, and all of the stuff about how he killed himself with his lifestyle might have been very unfair."

Dr Kingsmore and his team analysed a sample of Elvis’s hair and discovered an unusual change in the DNA code associated with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a rare heart muscle disease that mostly occurs in men between 20-40 years old.

Speaking to Dead Famous DNA presenter Mark Evans, Dr Kingsmore said: “We found a variant on Chromosome 11, known to cause cardiomyopathy – a thickening of the heart and weakening of the heart muscle. It looks suspicious that this may indeed have contributed – potentially – to Elvis’s death.”

Presley displayed many of the symptoms of cardiomyopathy, including an irregular heartbeat, fatigue, fainting and high blood pressure. Had specialists been aware of his cardiomyopathy, it is Dr Kingsmore’s view that the singer’s early death could have been avoided.

“We could have advised him to modify his diet and to see a cardiologist, to have his blood pressure checked and, you know, he may have had a different life.”

A junk food and prescription pills addict, Presley died in a bathroom at his Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tennessee and, although it was officially recorded that he had died of heart failure, constant speculation about his demise has continued for nearly 40 years.

While his research on the Elvis Presley case has once more increased his public profile, the former Chief Executive Officer and President of the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is already well known in medical circles.

His work as Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Missouri, and Director of the Center for Pediatric Genomic Medicine at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas, has commanded wide respect within his profession. Two years ago he was recognised as one of the ‘best physicians of the year’ by Medscape. In 2012, his genome sequencing technique for diagnosing genetic diseases in babies was named one of Time Magazine's top 10 medical breakthroughs of the year.

Dr Kingsmore and his team developed a rapid approach to screening which they can use to scan for 600 severe childhood diseases and provide results within four to six weeks.

Speaking to Kansas City Business Journal, said: "Part of the time we're working with the kids and parents to figure out causes of diseases, and that's about a 50-50 split."

He added: "For me personally, I spend half of my time here and half of my time travelling around places to tell people about what we do.”

Stephen  Kingsmore holds the Dee Lyons/Missouri Endowed Chair in Genomic Medicine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, and Executive Director of Medical Panomics at Children’s Mercy, Kansas City, where he is building scalable methods for pediatric genomic/precision medicine.

 

Stephen Kingsmore photo credit: Medscape

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