– How do some of the most in-shape athletes in the world suddenly suffer from traumatic heart issues, even with regular testing?
In: Biology
Athletes definitely have much lower rates of heart disease then the general population, but there are still a few things that affect them.
A strenuous lifestyle and massive gains in muscle mass can cause hypertension and put unexpected strain on the heart, and of course there are always genetic issues and freak occurrences that can’t be explained.
The bigger issue is that the overwhelming proportion of our clinical knowledge on heart disease comes from the average public and people in poor health, so problems in these athletes may be misdiagnosed.
A good example of this: if they were judged by the same scale as the general public most of these athletes would be considered overweight or obese, which is obviously not the case so physicians are in the dark when diagnosing related problems.
Heart problems can be hereditary, it’s just a roll of the dice really, exercise just gets you better odds
Long story short, there is no way to completely prevent these freak accidents. It’s super rare and these athletes are healthier than most people, but the strain caused by sports sometimes just happens to cause these things. Can also be a genetic thing as well. Either way it’s ridiculously rare and not something anyone should really worry about until it happens.
There’s also the thing for professional athletes, they carry out steenous exercise daily. Essentially our heart is a muscle, contracting to pump oxygenated blood out of the heart to all parts of the body, and “reloading” the chambers with more oxygenated blood from the lungs by relaxing.
Basic medical school anatomy teaches us the 4 chambers of the hearts, which are classified via the sides and position, which play different functions.
First there’s right and left, then there’s atrium and ventricle. Right atrium and ventricle are connected, just as the left atrium and ventricle, but both right and left sides are separated by the septum.
The atrium to to collects blood by relaxing, and contraction pumps the blood into the ventricles. The ventricles relax as the atrium contracts so there is a pressure difference and blood is allowed into the ventricle. The atrium then relaxes and the ventricle contracts to pump the blood out of the heart and to different parts of the body. (Right atrium pools deoxygenated blood from the body, right ventricle pumps the deoxygenated blood to the lungs where gaseous exchange happens) (The left atrium pools oxygenated blood from the lungs, and the left ventricle pumps the blood to all parts of your body)
If you understand the paragraph above, things get relatively simple from here.
The left ventricle itself is responsible for pumping bloods constantly to the entire body, even resisting gravity to pump bloods towards you brain, hence the walls of the left ventricle tends to be thicker and more muscular to enable the contraction to be stronger. Professional athletes exercise so much, they stress the heart out and the left ventricles tend to get microscopic tears and repair themselves to become stronger, but with time, scar tissues develop instead of new muscle and the ventricle walls become too thick and stiff (scar tissues lack elasticity of muscle cells) to contract properly, hence there’s is a chance when they’re on high stress exercises like Christian Eriksson, the heart just fails to pump blood and stops.
This phenomenon is called Left Ventricular Hypertrophy
Hope this helps.
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