Ruelas Opponent Dies After 13 Days in Coma : Boxing: Doctors say Jimmy Garcia, 23, succumbed because of blows to the brain, not loss of weight.

Super-featherweight Jimmy Garcia of Colombia died Friday morning from brain injuries suffered in a title fight with champion Gabriel Ruelas.

Garcia had been in a coma for 13 days after receiving repeated blows to the head in the May 6 bout at Caesars Palace. His life-support systems were shut off at 1:43 a.m. after physicians at University Medical Center in Las Vegas declared him brain dead.

The 23-year-old fighter, apparently weakened by his efforts to lose 30 pounds in the two months before the fight in order to make the 130-pound weight limit, was battered severely before the fight was halted in the 11th round. He collapsed in his corner and was rushed to the medical center, where brain surgery was performed within 35 minutes after the fight.

Albert Capanna, the surgeon who performed the operation, said Garcia suffered initially undetected slow bleeding from a vein in his head, bleeding that probably began during the fight. Pressure on the brain from the excess blood eventually produced brain death.

“In spite of the best efforts, sometimes the results are not what you want,” Capanna said.

Garcia was at least the fourth boxer to die from head injuries within the past 14 months. Last July, former Olympic welterweight gold medalist Wangila Napunyi of Kenya died two days after being knocked out in the ninth round by David Gonzales. Napunyi left the ring under his own power, but collapsed and required surgery the next day.

In April, British bantamweight Bradley Stone died from a massive blood clot on the brain after losing to Richie Wenton.

Amateur fighter Nathan Wigfall of Washington, D.C., died in January, collapsing the day after a three-round sparring session.

Super-middleweight Gerald McClellan was in a coma for two weeks in March after being knocked out by Nigel Benn in a title fight in London but has subsequently recovered.

Some fight promoters have speculated that Garcia’s rapid weight loss contributed to the brain damage. McClellan commonly also lost large amounts of weight before a fight. But medical experts said Friday that was unlikely.

“The loss of strength and stamina produced by rapid weight loss could predispose someone to defend himself less well than he would have at his normal weight, but weight loss of that sort would not in any way cause the brain to be more susceptible to damage from blows,” said Dr. George Lundberg, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Assn. Lundberg and the AMA have been campaigning for more than a decade to ban boxing because of the damage it produces in fighters’ brains.

Such weight loss is not desirable for a variety of medical reasons, but “it would not render his brain more vulnerable to injury,” added Hart Cohen, a neurologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “That’s extremely unlikely.”

Rather than the weight loss, the experts said, Garcia simply died from repeated blows to the head. “Boxing is assault with a blunt instrument--the sweat-soaked fist,” Lundberg said.

Boxing deaths are actually relatively rare. A 1980 study found 335 deaths worldwide among amateur and professional boxers between 1945 and 1979, and most experts agree that the rate is declining as the result of shorter amateur bouts and better medical supervision. Most estimates say about 500 fighters have died since the Marquess of Queensberry rules were adopted in 1884.

According to the AMA Council on Medical Affairs, the annual number of deaths is now about 0.13 per 1,000 participants, which is lower than or similar to the rates for other high-risk sports, such as horse racing, sky diving, mountaineering, motorcycle racing, hang gliding and parachuting.

But permanent brain damage is another matter. The stereotype of the “punch-drunk” fighter is based on a very strong reality, medical experts say.

“Pathological studies have shown that, as time goes by, boxers develop scars [in their brain], loss of brain cells and other abnormalities,” Cohen said. “Moreover, it has been demonstrated that the damage is related to the number of fights the boxer has had.”

This syndrome, known as “punch-drunk encephalopathy,” is characterized by such symptoms as slurred speech, loss of memory, slow mental processes, lack of balance and other symptoms typical of Parkinson’s disease. One of the best examples of the syndrome is former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, whose sharp wit and articulate speech have clearly been diminished.

Lundberg said that the majority of boxers suffer from the syndrome to some degree.