Sports Cardiology

Genetics, genetic testing and sports: Aspects from sports cardiology

There is a major trade-off between improvements in longevity, general health, fitness and quality of life due to regular intense physical activity on the one hand and possible cardiac risks on the other hand, whether for participants in leisure time sports activities or for highly trained athletes. Cardiac complications and sudden death in sports, even though rare, but dramatic, events, are mai...

Sports cardiology: current updates and new directions.

INTRODUCTION In 1901, Dr W Collier submitted a paper to the British Medical Journal entitled, ‘The effects of severe muscular exertion, sudden and prolonged, in young adolescents’. This early article demonstrated the predicament faced by physicians when dealing with athletes suspected of, or diagnosed with, a cardiovascular disease. Collier describes the case of an Oxford University mile runner...

Sports cardiology: preventing sudden cardiac death.

The sudden death of an athlete on the playing field remains one of the most striking and tragic events in sport. For the sports physician, the occurrence of an athlete in sudden cardiac arrest is both unforgettable and terrifying. Well-known cases such as Hank Gathers (1990), Marc-Vivien Foé (2003) and Fabrice Muamba (2012), provide graphic examples of an athlete enduring this deadly crisis—col...

[Guidelines on exercise and sports cardiology from the Brazilian Society of Cardiology and the Brazilian Society of Sports Medicine].

Sports cardiology: lessons from the past and perspectives for

The possibility of myocardial damage as a result of endurance sport has been known about since ancient times. According to a leg­end, a soldier named Pheidippides (more likely Philippides) dropped dead after run­ning from war­torn Marathon to Athens with the news of victory. Millennia later, we do not know whether he was a soldier or a courier, or whether he really ran the entire 240 km from At...