Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy

Some heart diseases are silent and deadly; they give no warnings or symptoms until the victim collapses. It is only after an autopsy that survivors find out that their loved one had a heart condition. A top high school basketball player with multiple scholarship offers suddenly falls to the court during a game and dies. His autopsy shows hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a congenital heart disease. His parents had no idea. He worked out every day and was in top physical condition. He was on two varsity teams. He took and passed a sports physical every year since he was nine years old. Doctors can’t hear cardiomyopathy through a stethoscope. Diseases such as this one, long Q-T syndrome, and many others can only be detected with advanced and costly
They estimate that the cost involved would range from $50,000 to $100,000 per year of life saved (Patel and Lantos 1299). The true cost is hard to determine for individual families. They place emphasis on doctors making judgment calls based on very thorough and focused histories, including family histories, and physical examinations. Underlying summary is that “we believe that there are too many unknowns about ECG screening to require it as a routine test for high school athletes” (Patel and Lantos 1300).
Link and Estes reference the Italian model once again and add an Israeli study and another by Maron and colleagues. Their findings were similar to the Italian model. Information is given to support the use of ECG in preathletic screenings. Additionally, even with conflicting data from all the studies, many countries and organizations, including the International Olympic Committee have now mandated PPE that includes ECG (Link and Estes 2513). This article supports greater effort in detecting predisposing cardiac conditions to save the lives of young