The heart attack that killed a police sergeant was triggered by running, not gunshot injuries suffered a few weeks earlier, a cardiologist told the Coroner's Court yesterday.
Raymond Chan Hon-wah, a consultant at Queen Mary Hospital, said 44-year-old Wong Siu-pang - who died after collapsing on a jogging track last October - had suffered from narrowed arteries for a decade.
His chronic high blood pressure, which had not been handled carefully, was an underlying cause of his heart disease.
Dr Chan said the gunshot wounds to his inner thigh and scrotum - inflicted when the gun carried by an emotionally disturbed constable went off during a scuffle in an underpass in Aberdeen on September 6 last year - had caused him no 'irreversible damage'.
The expert witness was giving evidence after Wong's family suggested that mental stress suffered after the shooting had contributed to his collapse. They said his health had deteriorated and he was always tired.
After studying the sergeant's medical history, Dr Chan rejected their suggestion, saying the hour-long workout on the track had caused blood to surge to the clogged coronary arteries, leading to an acute cardiac attack.
A postmortem examination, which found the cause of death to be a heart attack resulting from coronary atherosclerosis, revealed that one of Wong's prime coronary arteries and two smaller ones had been blocked by 50 to 95 per cent.
