The mystery surrounded Elvis Presley’s death after his family sealed the results of his autopsy for 50 years.
The king was only 43 when he was found facedown on the bathroom floor of his home in Graceland, looking like he fell from the toilet.
The last decade of his life has seen his health plummet dramatically. After years of drug abuse, the agile star weighed 25 pounds and spent months barricading in her room stuffing herself with plates of cheeseburgers.
He needed a full-time nurse and apparently refused to bathe during 1975, causing injuries to his body.
As a result of his horrendous diet, he suffered from chronic constipation and an autopsy found that he had compressed stools at the age of four months in his intestine.
(Image: Michael Ochs Archives)
The singer was also taking a cocktail of drugs and had received nearly 9,000 pills, bottles and injections in the seven months before his death.
And it was his girlfriend Ginger Alden who found the body of the rock and roll star with pajama pants around his ankles and his butt in the air.
Of the harrowing scene, Ginger, who was only 21 at the time, wrote in his memoirs: “His arms were on the floor, close to his sides, palms facing up.
“It was clear that, from the moment he hit the ground, Elvis did not move.”
“I gently turned his face to me. A hint of air came out of his nose.
“The tip of his tongue was clenched between his teeth and his face was stained.
“I gently lifted an eyelid. His eye was looking ahead and blood red. “
An autopsy was carried out on the same day, but the report was immediately sealed for 50 years by the family, sparking a series of speculations about what killed him.
Dan Warlick, chief investigator in the Tennessee State Chief Medical Examiner’s Office, attended the autopsy and fueled the popular theory that Elvis died while struggling to go to the bathroom.
He once said, “Presley’s chronic constipation – the result of years of prescription drug abuse and excessive intake of fat and cholesterol – caused what is known as the Valsalva maneuver. Simply put, the effort to defecate compressed the abdominal aorta. of the singer, closing his heart. ”
Others claimed he died of a drug overdose, but when the investigation reopened in 1994, coroner Joseph Davis disagreed.
(Image: Getty Images)
He explained: “The position of Elvis Presley’s body was such that he was about to sit on the dresser when the seizure occurred. He fell forward on the carpet, with his back up, and was dead when he hit the floor.
“If it had been a drug overdose, [Elvis] he would have fallen into a growing state of sleep. He reportedly pulled on his pajama pants and crawled to the door to seek help. It takes hours to die from drugs. “
The autopsy results will be revealed in 2027, but until then, the biggest insight into the star’s mysterious death came from prominent California physician Forest Tennant, who actually revised the report while defending Elvis’s doctor, Dr. George Nichopoulos, who he was subsequently absolved of excessive prescription of medications.
For Mr. Tennant, an important clue was in Elvis’ entire body deterioration, with almost every organ affected by health problems.
(Image: Corbis via Getty Images)
As a young man, Elvis was extremely fit, playing football and practicing martial arts. He started abusing drugs, including amphetamines, opioids and sedatives as a teenager and is known to have a terrible diet.
But for Tennant, that was not enough to explain the long list of illnesses that plagued the rock star from the late 1960s onwards.
First, he complained of dizziness, back pain and insomnia, eye infections and headaches and, in 1973, he was rushed to the hospital in a semi-coma and suffered from jaundice, severe breathing difficulties, severe swelling of the face , distended abdomen, constipation, bleeding gastric ulcer and hepatitis.
(Image: Getty)
He was hospitalized again in 1975 with high blood pressure, high cholesterol and a condition called megacolon, in which the large intestine is distended and can allow toxins to flood the body.
He also had at least four near-death overdoses that left him unconscious and in need of resuscitation, and his heart was twice the normal size.
And although he never smoked, he also suffered from emphysema. So, what caused all these disease processes in your stomach, liver, lungs, heart, spine, eyes and intestines?
Forest believes it is all due to a serious head injury he suffered in 1967, which triggered a progressive autoimmune inflammatory disorder.
(Image: Rex)
In his opinion, as reported in a 2013 medical article, when Elvis tripped over a television wire and fell into the bathtub, the injury was so severe that it caused the brain tissue to dislodge and leak into the bloodstream.
There, the body identified the matter as foreign and produced antibodies to destroy it, triggering hypogammaglobulinemia, a disorder of the body’s immune system.
At the time, little was known about autoimmune diseases, but today it is known that they cause most of the symptoms that Elvis exhibited, from chronic pain, irrational behavior, obesity and enlarged and diseased organs, such as heart and intestines.
And in 2016 Garry Rodgers, a retired homicide detective and forensic coroner, told the Huffington Post that, with these findings in mind, he would have attributed Elvis’ death to a heart attack caused by heart disease and drug use caused by a autoimmune disease that was triggered by a brain injury.
He said, “I would have to classify Elvis’ death as an accident. There is no one to blame – certainly not Elvis. He was a seriously injured and sick man.
“There is no specific neglect on the part of anyone and there is definitely no cover-up or conspiracy of a criminal act.
“If Dr. Forrest Torrent is right, there just wasn’t an adequate understanding at that time to determine what really killed the King of Rock & Roll.”