Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

The sudden death of a completive athlete is a personal tragedy that has a great impact on medical communities, families, and friends. Such an event often assumes a high public profile because of the generally held perception that athletes are among the healthiest people in our society. There is also a general consensus that within a civilized society there is a responsibility on the part of physicians to make sufficient efforts to identify life threatening cardiovascular diseases in competitive athletes. The differential diagnosis between athlete’s heart syndrome and HCM represents a vital clinical dilemma that is not easily solved. The heart undergoes profound changes in response to athletic training, producing in well-conditioned athletes morphologic, functional, and electrophysiologic alterations. But a perplexing situation for the clinician is the athlete whose problem cannot be attributed to the athletic heart syndrome. The usual clinical situation is one in which exercise-associated collapse, near-syncope, or syncope is the presenting complaint, and a carefully taken history and physical examination reveal little. Further workup will usually include an electrocardiogram (ECG) and/or an echocardiogram. If the ECG demonst