Endurance Sports May Hurt the Heart

A new study by Belgian researchers has found that endurance sports may lead to a rare but life-threatening heart condition in certain athletes. Such sports may cause abnormal heart rate and rhythm which might be fatal.

Ventricular arrhythmia (VA) is a condition in which there is a disturbance in the ventricles or lower chambers of the heart. It can cause sudden death in top athletes who have never had any symptoms of any kind of heart disorders.

For their study, the researchers studied Dutch and Belgian athletes with VA and compared them with other healthy sportspeople and volunteers. X-rays of the heart were taken for all subjects in addition to measuring the volume of blood flow in the right ventricle and the thickness of the walls in the chamber.

The researchers found that athletes with VA had abnormal functioning of the right ventricle. They also discovered that the abnormality in the right ventricle in the athletes was much more subtle than in the volunteers whose VA was cause by genetic factors.

VA can be caused by more than one underlying causes but according to the researchers, in these athletes it might be caused by intense exercise. They feel endurance sports in combination with genetic or environmental factors could promote the arrhythmia.

“Our study does not provide definitive proof for either of these explanations, but our data contribute to the accumulating, indirect evidence that endurance exercise may have detrimental effects on the RV in some athletes,” said Professor Hein Heidbuchel of the University of Leuven in Belgium.

Reporting their findings in the European Heart Journal, the researchers quoted other studies which suggest that endurance exercise increases the workload on the thin walls of the right ventricle. This in turn might lead to the structural changes observed in the chamber of the hearts of the athletes.

“Determining the underlying genetic profile of these athletes may provide further data and that work is under way,” said Heidbuchel. “We also do not know whether substance abuse may have contributed to the observed changes, although all study subjects denied such use and there was no other evidence for it in any of them,” he added.

Related Discussions Do you actually think about your heart? Working of the heart Computer and heart

Related Articles Parkinson�s Drugs Hurt the Heart Summer Barbecues Hurt the Heart Those Extra Pounds Can Hurt Your Heart!