Sudden death in the athlete Why does it occur?
Today we already know that sport is the trigger of death, because the heart had an underlying pathology, i.e., an athlete who dies doing sport, means that he was carrying a heart, or was training a heart with a pathology. Nowadays we can detect these pathologies, probably not in a hundred percent, but in a very high percentage. We have to see if by means of the resting electrocardiogram, by means of the electrocardiogram of the stress test, or by means of other tests, such as DNA tests, we can reach the conclusion as to what pathology that heart has and if we have the obligation to determine, then that athlete can do sports, but does not have to do competitive sports.
What should we do as sportsmen and women?
The most important thing for all athletes is the medical check-up, that is the most important thing. The medical check-up consists of a resting electrocardiogram and a stress electrocardiogram. So these two data, which we will talk about a little more later, are going to be the main part of the athlete, what the athlete has to do in order to be perfectly aware of what limitations he/she has when doing sports, and what possibilities he/she has to do it to the maximum.
The stress test, the resting electrocardiogram, hopefully they will give us the “OK”, if they give us the “OK”, we will have to carry out a regulated training, a training by means of pulsations, by means of power, in case we are cycling. The point is that we are perfectly controlled when training, that we know what effort we have to make and that, by means of the electrocardiogram and the stress test, we are able to make that same effort.
Is a good resting electrocardiogram so vital?
The truth is that until now there have always been different research groups that had a series of opinions about the resting electrocardiogram, and other groups that thought it was not so important. Dr. Collado and Dr. Basso, a series of doctors in Italy, have carried out a 35-year research project in which they have managed to ensure that in one region, the Veneto region, all those between 12 and 35 years of age, who wanted to do some sport, had to have an “OK” resting electrocardiogram. In those 35, from 25 to 35 years of analysis, they have managed to reduce sudden deaths to practically zero per hundred thousand inhabitants.
What is the importance of the stress test?
As I said, the stress test, once we have an “OK” resting electrocardiogram, will determine our level of physical fitness. We are people who have a lot of endurance, we have prepared very well, we lack strength, we lack power, we lack recovery, or the opposite, we have very little endurance, and nevertheless we have a powerful anaerobic capacity, we have a very good response to short stimuli, we recover very well, etc. All these things will be determined by the stress test.
What conclusion can we draw from this, Doctor?
Well, as a conclusion I would say that it is vital that at least one stress test per year for each athlete, even when the athlete is already training intensively, a stress test at each change of training group, at each change of training system. I call them phases, because sometimes you are in the endurance phase, you move on to the endurance phase, we do a stress test, you move on to the speed phase, we do a stress test. In other words, every three months, every three and a half months, if the athlete changes training phases, a stress test is advisable.