Chronic Constipation Killed Elvis

Presley's colon was 5 to 6 inches wide, 8 to 9 feet long
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted May 7, 2010 8:08 AM CDT
Chronic Constipation Killed Elvis
25th March 1958: American singer and actor Elvis Presley (1935-1977) sitting on a bench eating a sandwich, Memphis, Tennessee.   (Getty Images)

Most assume drug dependency and obesity were the main players in Elvis Presley’s death, but the truth may actually be more embarrassing: The King was chronically constipated. His longtime doctor and friend George Nichopoulos writes about the problem in his new book, The King and Dr. Nick, revealing that Presley’s colon was twice as long and twice as wide as a normal colon at the time of his death, and that four- to five-month-old stool was found in it during the autopsy.

The TMI continues, in a Fox News look at the book: Due to the treatments attempted for his constipation, Elvis would “have accidents onstage,” Nichopoulos writes. Even his bloated appearance can be explained by this little problem: Presley sometimes looked better, and that was because “he had a good healthy bowel movement and then lost a lot of weight from that.”
(More Elvis Presley stories.)

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