screening for sudden cardiac arrest

Page: 1 2 3 4 (of 4)	Previous | Next

is your child at risk?

Sudden cardiac death is extremely rare, and shocking when it occurs, says pediatric cardiologist Robert Gajarski, M.D., of the University of Michigan Health System. Iin most cases, there are no symptoms. “You are really looking at one person in every 200,000 (young athletes),” or about 50 to 100 deaths each year, he says. But that doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking for families and friends.

Gajarski says that each young athlete should have a physical examination before participating in sports, noting there is controversy over how far those physicals should go. “There is now a push in some circles to include comprehensive cardiac screenings in those physicals, in hopes of identifying abnormalities such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy early on,” he says. “But it just isn’t practical.”

Holly Morrell thinks otherwise. Morrell is the executive director of California-based A Heart for Sports, a nonprofit organization that pushes for more comprehensive sports physicals for young athletes. “We want to make sure that any cases get detected way before tragedy strikes,” she says. In California, cardiologists supervise free, on-site cardiovascular screenings for young athletes using ultrasound imaging.

However, according to Gajarski, running these kinds of tests on all young athletes who are participating in sports is cost-prohibitive. The testing also can generate a lot of false positive results, leading to even more testing. Such results could prevent many young athletes from participating in sports.

A better option, Gajarski says, is conducting a comprehensive family health history on young athletes. “Since so many of these incidents involve a genetic abnormality, you can get a better picture by asking some key questions,” he says. “You want to know if anybody in the family has had sudden cardiac arrest or suddenly died before the age of 50.”

The Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Association suggests that family health history questionnaires ask about relatives with any kind of heart disease, including ruptures in the aorta or Marfan syndrome, an inherited connective tissue disease that can affect the cardiovascular system.