SPORTS
CARDIOLOGYGRAY
ZONE PROBLEM IN ATHLETES
Kasikcioglu
Erdem
Istanbul
University, Faculty of
Medicine, Department of Sports Medicine, Turkey
Sports physicians are
frequently involved in an effort to increase the participation of
competitive sports, and decrease any potential risk among subjects with
heart disease. Healthy young athletes very rarely experience extremely
severe cardiovascular events, these events are dropped a bomb into
population. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is a complex cardiac disease
with a heterogeneous genetic, morphologic, and clinical spectrum and it
is the most important cause of sudden cardiac death among young
athletes. The diagnostic criteria for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy
includes a hypertrophic, but not dilated, left ventricle, in the
absence of systemic disease or left ventricular hypertrophy due to
left-sided obstruction. The differentiation between physiological and
pathologic hypertrophy may be difficult, and is important in
determining the presence or absence of cardiac disease in athletes in
order to prevent exercise- related sudden cardiac death.
A
specific finding in this study is a lower incidence of grey scale in
athletes, even though high prevalence of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is
thought to be expected in the general population. It is
accurately known frequency known highly trained adult athletes show
mildly increased left ventricular wall thicknesses of hypertrophic
cardiomyopathy diagnostic level, which define a grey zone where extreme
expressions of athlete’s heart and mild morphological forms
of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy overlap. Although echocardiography may
not be cost-effective, it is a valuable non-invasive method for
differentiating cardiac pathologies other than athlete’s
heart. Echocardiography is not only helpful for the accurate diagnosis
of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, but also facilitates its risk
stratification, such as the level of outflow tract obstruction.
