With the recent death of Gaines Adams, defensive end for the Chicago Bears, and Jeron Lewis, a Southern Indiana University basketball player, public and scientific attention has been more and more focused on heart health. Both players suffered from heart enlargement, which puts many athletes’ wellbeing at risk to cardiac arrest and sudden heart rhythm disturbance.
Often developed from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, both players’ autopsy revealed that they had an enlarged heart condition, which is responsible for causing half of the sudden death cases involving athletes under the age of 35. When your heart becomes enlarged by hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, this means your heart muscle has thickened abnormally, which can cause heart rhythm disturbance and sudden death.
Richard Kerber, MD, from the University of Iowa, explained, ‘In a majority of cases, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is inherited and develops over time, typically in the late teenage years. Symptoms include black-out spells, unexplained dizziness, and chest pains that occur briefly during competition or training, but then disappear with rest.’ The reason why sudden death may occur in athletes is because their symptoms of enlarged heart may not be present, and so they cannot take preventative wellness measures.
Yet athletes are known to have enlarged hearts, as your body sometimes reacts in this way to cope with intense levels of exercise. Unlike hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an enlarged heart is not a disease and can be found with a routine echocardiogram. Following the sudden death of marathon runner Ryan Shay, age 28, Dr Lori Mosca, director of preventive cardiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, spoke in 2007 at a meeting of the American Heart Association.
Mosca explained, ‘so-called “athlete’s heart” thickens the heart muscle overall; hypertrophic cardiomyopathy creates thickening in one part of the heart and makes it harder to pump blood out to the body. One in 500 people have the disorder; some people have no symptoms. Sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish between these two conditions – one being benign and one being potentially lethal.’
Last year, a study from Johns Hopkins recommended that athletes have EKG and echocardiogram testing, instead of just EKG alone. However, even with intense screening, enlarged heart in athletes from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy can go undetected. The researchers also pointed out that sports people also need to report symptoms of chest pain, dizziness, or shortness of breath, which often go unreported as they could be considered normal during intense training.
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