I am an athlete and I am curious to know how this happens and how we can prevent it
In: Biology
Young athletes-it’s often arrhythmia and or genetic causes of cardiac hypertrophy. Hard to tell by physical exam, this needs an echocardiogram and electrical studies (ekg, or a version you wear)
Mid 30s and on, mostly men: High cholesterol doesn’t scale 1:1 with weight gain, and they have severe blockages of the arteries of the heart. There are many families where men die by 55. I once did an autopsy of a teenage male of normal weight, in a family where his grandfather was already dead at 55ish, and this teenager already had 70% of the cross sectional area of a major coronary vessel occluded. That wasn’t why he died (accident), but if you added 25 lbs of extra weight and mild diabetes, or moderate hypertension that could’ve killed him before age 40.
Prevent this? Blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugars are normal or medicated till they are.
Some heart conditions are congenital, meaning you are born with them. There’s no way to prevent them. At best they might be diagnosed and proper treatment might be administered, but in many cases they go undiagnosed for years until you just have a heart attack.
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