Screening for heart defects in high school and college athletes should be expanded after an $88 heart scan detected life-threatening conditions in Harvard University athletes, researchers said.
Tests known as electrocardiography, or ECG, identified two players who were deemed healthy in routine examinations despite having dangerous defects that should bar them from competition, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Scientists in three of the journal’s articles debated the merits of routine ECG tests for all competitive athletes.
Genetic heart defects caused the courtside deaths of Hank Gathers, an All-America 23-year-old basketball forward at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and Reggie Lewis, a 27- year-old All Star guard for the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association. Such defects are the top cause of sudden death in sports, killing 1 of every 220,000 young athletes each year, according to previous studies.
“The most important thing in screening is that you don’t miss people,” said Aaron Baggish, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. “We’d much rather screen a bunch of people and have to do more testing on a select few than miss one or two people and have them collapse.”
The biggest drawback to the tests was the number of young athletes who were incorrectly identified as having a risk, Baggish said yesterday in a telephone interview. That’s because athletes undergoing intense training develop a natural stiffening of the heart wall that can be incorrectly diagnosed as a heart defect with an ECG, he said.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-02/sports-death-risk-in-harvard-athletes-seen-with-88-heart-scan.html