EXCLUDING trauma, cardio death is the most frequent cause of sports-related death in the world. Five out of 100,000 athletes have a condition that predisposes them to sudden death and one out of 200,000 athletes pet. year have sudden death.

Dr Haji Nazar Luqman pointed this out in his presentation on Sudden Cardiovascular Death in Sports during the 2nd International Olympic Committee Sports Medicine Course yesterday.

“Sudden cardiac death (SCD) is a syndrome defined by its clinical presentation rather than by a discrete pathophysiology.

“SCD associated with sports activity is a rare but devastating event. Victims are usually young and apparently healthy but many have underlying cardiovascular disease that is not diagnosed until after the event

“As a result, there is great interest in detecting such abnormalities early and then defining appropriate activity restrictions for affected individuals to minimise the risk of SCD,” he said.

The head of cardiology department in RIPAS said “the majority of SCD are due to malignant arrhythmias usually ventricular tachycardia (VT) or ventricular Fibrillation (VF). In the small number of individuals with certain cardiac disorders, athletics can increase the likelihood of these events in two ways namely prolonged physical training induces changes in cardiac structure that create arrhythmic substrate or immediate physiological demands of intense athletics can trigger malignant arrhythmias and SCD.”

To reduce the risk of Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD) in sports, he advised sporting organisations to screen all the athletes. When asked if there are any cases of Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD), Dr Haji Danish Zaheer, head of sports medicine and research centre, said “There was a case of a foreign hockey coach who passed away late in the 1990′s on the hockey field after he suddenly collapsed. And there was another case of a man who played football and while on his way home, he passed away”.

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