Latest news with #suddencardiacdeath
The Independent
21-05-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Scientists raise alarm over sudden deaths among professional body builders
Male bodybuilders are facing a high risk of sudden death from heart problems, scientists warn in a new study. The research, published on Wednesday in the European Heart Journal, highlights the health risks associated with professional bodybuilding and calls for greater awareness and preventive strategies within this community. Sudden cardiac death is when someone dies unexpectedly due to a heart problem and is generally rare among young individuals. However, the new study found that the condition kills an unusually high proportion of male bodybuilders, including young ones, with professional ones at the highest risk. In the study, an international team of researchers looked for reports of deaths among 20,286 male bodybuilders who had competed in at least one bodybuilding event between 2005 and 2020, and had these reports verified by doctors. They particularly looked for reports of deaths of any of these named competitors in five different languages across different web sources, including official media reports, social media, bodybuilding forums and blogs. Reported deaths were then cross-referenced using multiple sources and verified and analysed by doctors to establish the cause of death. Overall, researchers found 121 deaths among the over 20,000 professional bodybuilders, with the average age at death of 45 years. Cardiac death accounted for nearly 40 per cent of these 121 mortalities, according to the study. Professional bodybuilders experienced a fivefold greater risk of cardiac death compared to amateurs, scientists found. Autopsy reports of some of the deceased bodybuilders that were available showed signs of thickening or enlargement of the heart and coronary artery disease. Some also seemed to have abused anabolic substances, researchers found. 'Bodybuilding involves several practices that could have an impact on health, such as extreme strength training, rapid weight loss strategies including severe dietary restrictions and dehydration, as well as the widespread use of different performance-enhancing substances,' study co-author Marco Vecchiato said. These practices place significant strain on the heart and may lead to structural changes over time, researchers warned. 'Professional athletes had a markedly higher incidence of sudden cardiac death, suggesting that the level of competition might contribute to this increased risk,' Dr Vecchiato said. 'The risk may be greater for professional bodybuilders because they are more likely to engage intensively in these practices over prolonged periods and may experience higher competitive pressure to achieve extreme physiques,' he explained. Scientists call for proactive heart screening and counselling among bodybuilders, 'even in young and apparently healthy athletes'. 'For bodybuilders, the message is clear: while striving for physical excellence is admirable, the pursuit of extreme body transformation at any cost can carry significant health risks, particularly for the heart,' Dr Vecchiato said. 'Awareness of these risks should encourage safer training practices, improved medical supervision, and a different cultural approach that firmly rejects the use of performance-enhancing substances,' he said. The findings highlight the need for a cultural shift in bodybuilding, including stronger anti-doping measures and education campaigns about the risks of drug abuse. About 15 per cent of the 121 deaths assessed in the study were categorised as 'sudden traumatic deaths', including car crashes, suicides, murders and overdoses. 'These findings underline the need to address the psychological impact of bodybuilding culture,' scientists concluded.
Medscape
13-05-2025
- Health
- Medscape
Good News and Sobering News on Cardiac Risks in Marathoners
This transcript has been edited for clarity. Michelle L. O'Donoghue, MD, MPH: Hi. I am Dr Michelle O'Donoghue, reporting for Medscape. Joining me today is Dr Aaron Baggish. He's a professor of medicine at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and is the former director of the Massachusetts General Hospital's Cardiovascular Performance Program. Thanks for joining me, Dr Baggish. Aaron L. Baggish, MD: Michelle, it's a real pleasure. Thank you for having me. SCD in Endurance Events O'Donoghue: You've been at the forefront of focusing on athletes and both their ability to participate in competitive sports as well as better understanding outcomes for athletes who may have underlying cardiac conditions that could put them at increased risk for sudden cardiac death during participation sports. Baggish: This has been a 20-year journey for me, but it's really only been in the past 10 years that the field of sports cardiology has firmly gelled. We're now seeing this as an accepted part of the entire cardiovascular offering, if you will, from a high-level service provider, like where you work at Brigham and Women's Hospital or Mass General. It's been really fun to be a part of that. O'Donoghue: I'd like to talk a little bit more about that journey over time, but most recently, focusing in on some of the data that you presented at the American College of Cardiology and focusing on the incidence of sudden cardiac arrest in people participating in long-distance running — mostly, of course, marathons, but also half-marathons, so those types of endurance events. Would you tell us a little bit more about that? Baggish: I'd be pleased to. At this year's American College of Cardiology (ACC) meeting, we had the opportunity to present the RACER 2 data, which are a look at cardiac arrest incidence and survival rates over the past 13 years in the United States. Before delving into those data, it's worth sharing the background for this. In 2012, we published the first RACER study, which very much set the benchmark for what was happening for the first decade of the century in the United States. That provided some baseline incidence statistics. We were at that point able to establish that the survival rate for runners that had cardiac arrest on the course was roughly 30%.Importantly, we learned about why people lived and why they died. One of the most important things being that most of these events occur very late in the race, within sight of the finish line. After RACER was published, as I think you know, I was fortunate enough to be working in the capacity as medical director for the Boston Marathon and tried hard with colleagues all over the country to take some of what we learned in RACER and translate it into better rationale for doing the RACER 2 study was to see if that work had made a difference. O'Donoghue: What were the topline findings that you presented? Baggish: There was both a sobering story and a good news story. The sobering story was that the actual incidence of cardiac arrest over the past 20 years really hasn't changed much. Most specifically, for the highest-risk group who are men who run the marathon distance, which is 26.2 miles or 42 kilometers, depending on which system you use, roughly 1 in 100 runners will succumb to cardiac arrest. This, as maybe we'll talk about later, is a wake-up call for us to think about more in the primary prevention space. The really exciting finding in RACER 2 is that we had essentially seen a 50% improvement in survival. Back with the first study, that was a 30% survival rate. Now, we see a 70% survival rate. This can really be attributed to a small list of important interventions. O'Donoghue: What kind of interventions are we talking about?Is it about availability of defibrillators or other? Baggish: It's two things. What we learned from RACER is that immediate bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and timely access to external defibrillation were perfect predictors of survival. What we did after RACER is make a concerted effort to make certain that those two things were available in as many race circumstances as possible. When we looked at our predictors of survival in RACER 2, there was now almost uniform application of defibrillators and CPR. This translated into much better outcomes. From HCM to CAD and a Paradigm Shift in Guidelines O'Donoghue: Many people think to themselves that it's people who perhaps have underlying conditions such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy who succumb to these types of events during a long-distance race. What did you actually observe? Baggish: In RACER 2, it was very interesting, and this represented a shift from RACER in which hypertrophic cardiomyopathy was indeed the most common finding either at autopsy after death or on clinical evaluation after survival. We saw a shift in RACER 2, and some of this shift may be due to the way evaluations are done now or the way autopsies are clearly, the dominant cause of cardiac arrest is simple atherosclerotic coronary disease among typically older athletes. O'Donoghue: That is perhaps just a nice segue as we think about the participation of people who might have underlying cardiac conditions such as hypertrophic so long, there used to be somewhat of a blanket recommendation for many people to not participate in competitive sports. How has that changed over the past several years? How are we thinking about that now? Baggish: This is a really exciting paradigm shift in the way we care for active many decades, based largely on appropriate concern about pushing the body hard with an underlying heart problem, the approach has been to limit and take away competitive sport participation from all people that have that condition. Quite frankly, this was an understandable but old-school approach, which was really based in paternalisticmedicine. What's happened over the past decade is there have been data series showing that exercise is actually much safer than we expected among people that have this condition, including relatively high levels of competitive exercise. While the risk is not zero, and certainly there is still a risk assessment situation that needs to occur every time the diagnosis is made, we've moved away fromlimiting people universally and have entered into an era where shared decision-making between the doctor and the patient has become the recommended practice. O'Donoghue: That is actually an important shift, as you phrase it, from that former paternalistic approach, but for many people it was really devastating to be told that in fact they could never participate in any type of competitive sport in their done a nice job of also highlighting how that could lead to depression and have many consequences that perhaps the physician at the time was not always keeping in mind. Baggish: As you highlight, Michelle, shared decision-making is not about unchecked autonomy. It's not telling every person to go forth and do whatever they want without thought and consideration. I think the part of the equation that's been missing for so many years is the downside of taking physical activity away from people after a cardiac diagnosis. This can have not only health implications but also have social, academic, and occupational implications. We now see both sides of the equation. What we do with the patient athlete when a new diagnosis is established is work with them and often times other people that are important to them — whether it's family members, teammates, coaches, administrators — whoever it is to come up with the right decision that balances both their medical risk and their personal preferences and values. O'Donoghue: As we think about shared decision-making, I know that one area of your research has been looking at survival rates, not only for long-distance runners but also, for instance, for youth participating in competitive sports who may unfortunately have a sudden cardiac death, albeit very rare. If a defibrillator, for instance, is available, where somebody is participating in a sport and somebody does receive an appropriate shock, do we know the survival rates for those individuals and perhaps this puts more of a focus even on the pediatric population? Higher Risks in Underserved Populations Baggish: Also presented at the recent ACC meeting was a look at what happens in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The focus of that paper, which I also had the privilege of being involved in, was a clear documentation of the fact that survival rates have improved in that population as well.I personally don't think that has anything to do with more effectively screening people out of sport who have heart conditions. What it has to do with is having robust emergency action plans. In colleges and universities — and this is trickling down into high school and youth sports, as it should— it's now become clear that if you are going to oversee young people participating in sport, or even older people for that matter, that the most important thing you can do is have a well-developed and rehearsed emergency action plan, which again, is about two simple things. It's immediate CPR and access to a defibrillator, ideally within 3 minutes of collapse. O'Donoghue: If I'm correct, one of the observations in that particular analysis that was done was that race appeared to be a predictor of worse survival. Is part of that related to perhaps lack of either defibrillator access or education on the front of that type of emergency action plan you're talking about, including CPR? Baggish: I think so. I want to be clear that we have many unanswered questions about the impact of social determinants of health, structural racism, all of the terms that we're now more familiar with as they translate into outcomes and athletes. What I see is the next 5-10 years of very important work is to better understand why this is what we're seeing and also figure out ways to reduce those care gaps. I don't think it has anything to do with the intrinsic biology of how people self-report their race. I think it has to do with the environments in which they live and practice sport, and some insufficiencies in some places where people from typically underserved populations tend to be. O'Donoghue: Thanks for highlighting these important points. As you say, there's the good news aspect of this that, for people who have this type of complication, either during youth competitive sports or endurance athletes, fortunately, it does appear that overall survival is improving. Hopefully, as we continue to have cost reduced for things like defibrillator access and continuing to work on education, that we can continue to improve those rates even further. Baggish: I'm hopeful that will represent the future. I think there's still a large amount of science to be done to help us understand this issue of racial disparities and how they translate it to differential is not unique to sports cardiology. This is across all aspects of cardiovascular medicine. I'm excited to see where that goes in the next 5-10 years. O'Donoghue: Thanks again for joining me today. Signing off for Medscape, this is Dr Michelle O'Donoghue.
BBC News
11-05-2025
- Health
- BBC News
Cleethorpes family in heart screening drive after sudden death
The family of a 24-year-old woman who died suddenly after going into cardiac arrest in a supermarket are raising funds to screen young people for heart Chatterton, from Cleethorpes, died in May 1999 from an undiagnosed heart condition that could have been picked up with mark the anniversary, Miss Chatterton's mum Monica said she wanted to raise £6,800 to screen 100 young people in one day in North East week in the UK, at least 12 young people aged 35 and under die suddenly from a previously undiagnosed heart condition, according to the charity Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY). Miss Chatterton had recently completed a masters degree in music at Huddersfield University and had planned a career in music therapy. At about 09:00 BST, the graduate had stopped off at Morrison's in the town on the way to the gym. She collapsed and died in the store."So many questions went through our minds with no immediate answers: what happened, how and more importantly, why?" Mrs Chatterton inquest found that Miss Chatterton died from a rare genetic heart disorder which led to sudden cardiac death. 'Family's devastation' To mark the 26th anniversary of Josephine's death, her family set up a Just Giving page to raise funds to screen people aged 14 to 35 in North East Lincolnshire."We want to try and alleviate other family's devastation at losing a young person to a sudden cardiac death," Mrs Chatterton Chatterton was the second youngest of five children. She would have been 51 in July. "We now have grandchildren and great grandchildren who are being tested to ensure there is no genetic inheritance for future concerns," Mrs Chatterton charity CRY said it has been lobbying parliament for nearly 20 years for a national screening Steven Cox, the chief executive said: "One in 300 young people screened will have a potentially life-threatening condition identified on the ECG. They'll benefit from advice to prevent a cardiac arrest."The screening event will be held at Grimsby Leisure's Health and Wellbeing Centre. A date has not yet been confirmed. Listen to highlights from Lincolnshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North or tell us about a story you think we should be covering here.
