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Electrocardiograms May Not Flag Student Athletes at Risk of Heart Problems
Filed under: In The News
Fresh research suggests students may not be safe just because an electrocardiogram says so. Credit: AFP/Getty Images
USA Today reports electrocardiograms are an inaccurate way to screen for heart defects.
According to the newspaper, the overall accuracy of the tests hovers around 67 percent. Fresh research on the effectiveness of electrocardiograms, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, comes just as schools are under increasing pressure to use them to detect athletes at risk.
That pressure spiked when 16-year-old Michigan high school student Wes Leonard died March 3 right after he sunk the winning basket to close his team's perfect 20-0 season.
Some European countries require ECGs for student athletes. The American Heart Association's 2007 guidelines call for thorough pre-participation checkups but stop short of recommending ECGs.
Some 10.7 million American teenagers play high school sports. That could make any attempt to require ECGs tricky, says Allison Hill of the Stanford University School of Medicine, the lead researcher on the effectiveness of the tests.
"The difficulty of interpreting ECG results, combined with the very large population of young athletes in the USA, may make such laws impractical," Hill tells USA Today.
Hill and her fellow researchers recommend cardiologists be trained appropriately if ECGS are used in screenings. According to USA Today, SCA can lead to death in minutes and occurs when an electrical malfunction in the heart stops the heart's pumping action.
One of the most common causes is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an often symptom-free condition where the lining of the heart muscles thickens and restricts blood flow.
"We're saying if the U.S. is going to enter into this debate, then we have to make sure physicians know how to read the tests, and that's an area that no one has discussed yet," researcher Anne Durbin tells the newspaper.
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