Heart changes more common in black NFL players
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Abnormalities seen on electrocardiogram - a test that detects and records the heart’s electrical activity—are twice as common in black professional football players as in white players, researchers have found.
“Importantly, while these ECG changes initially suggested possible structural heart disease that might well put these players at risk for untoward cardiac events like sudden death, further, more extensive evaluation did not show any heart problems,” Dr. Anthony Magalski told Reuters Health.
“Our findings,” he said, “need to be taken into account when people (the medical community, high schools, colleges) debate incorporating the ECG into pre-participation exam programs because it is likely that more blacks than whites would show concerning changes.”
“This would then require more extensive evaluation, or even worse, inappropriate disqualification from competitive sports,” Magalski added.
Intense physical conditioning can change the structure and function of the heart -a condition often dubbed “athlete’s heart.” It’s been suggested that ECG patterns in healthy, highly trained athletes may differ by race, although this has not been looked at in depth—until now.
Magalski from the University of Missouri, Kansas City and colleagues studied ECG patterns in 1,969 “heart healthy” pro football players, including 396 black players, 78 white players and 6 players of other races.
Abnormal ECG patterns—present in 480 players overall (25 percent)—were significantly more common in black football players (30 percent) than in white players (13 percent) and players of other races (15 percent).
“Distinctly abnormal” ECG patterns, suggestive of heart disease were also more common in black players than in white players (6 percent versus 2 percent), they report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
However, more extensive testing performed for 203 players (40 percent) who had abnormal ECG patterns did not show any structural changes in the heart, suggesting that these alterations did not represent true heart problems.
Furthermore, because black race proved to be the only independent predictor of ECG abnormalities, suggests “the potential for a high rate of false positive results in black athletes” when ECG exams are incorporated into cardiovascular screening programs for athletes, the investigators note.
SOURCE: Journal of the American College of Cardiology, June 10, 2008.
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