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Research
Research into sudden cardiac death has led the European Society of Cardiology (ESC 2005) and International Olympic Committee (IOC) to recommend cardiac screening for any young person taking part in competitive sport.

Sport itself does not lead to cardiac arrest, but can trigger a sudden death by aggravating an undetected cardiac abnormality.  In countries such as Italy, screening participants in representative sports is mandatory. In some professions cardiac testing is also mandatory.

If you have an interest in this research area then you may also be interested in conferences such as the CRY International Conferences and EuroPRevent 2013

 

Professor Sanjay Sharma - CRY Consultant Cardiologist
I have been involved with CRY since 1996 and they have facilitated several research projects relating to regional/national British athletes. Most of the work was generated from cardiovascular evaluation of athletes as part of a screening programme aimed to identify disorders capable of causing sudden cardiac death. We evaluated several thousand athletes aged 14-35 years and had many "firsts" in the scientific literature.

  1. CRY were the first to provide information on the physiological upper limits of cardiac dimensions in adult National British athletes (Published in European Journal of Applied Physiology).

  2. CRY were the first organisation ever to characterise cardiac dimensions in a large cohort of adolescent athletes, who are most vulnerable to sudden death during sport from cardiomyopathy. Landmark studies in the Journal of American College of Cardiology and Heart are the main international studies on this subject.

  1. CRY wrote the first paper on ECG changes in adolescent athletes (1000 athletes studied) which was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine and is a blueprint for the European Society of Sports Cardiology.

  2. CRY have performed the only study on cardiovascular adaptation in athletes of West African origin. The results show that ECGs in black athletes are quite different to those in white athletes and could be mistaken for serious cardiac disorder.

  3. CRY are the first organisation to state the prevalence and significance of an isolated long QT interval in elite athletes. This study has called for revision of consensus guidelines published by the American College of Cardiology.

  4. CRY is the first to describe the prevalence of HCM in elite athletes.

 

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) Consensus Statement on Periodic Health Evaluation of Elite Athletes
March 2009

The scope of the cardiovascular PHE is to detect potentially lethal cardiovascular disease in elite athletes and start appropriate management to reduce the risk for sudden cardiac death and/or disease progression in a timely fashion.

 

Research news from the CRY Update magazine

 

 


Research with animals - CRY’s position

 

CRY does not contribute to any medical research which involves animals. All of the research that CRY contributes to is with human participants after informed consent has been obtained.
 

This includes:

  • Evaluation of young people screened through CRY’s cardiac screening programme

  • Evaluation of case studies of elite sportspeople who are tested through CRY's cardiac screening programme

  • Evaluation of families who have suffered a bereavement due to a young sudden cardiac death

  • Evaluation of young people who have been identified with a cardiac condition that could put them at greater risk of suffering a cardiac event and have had medical treatment or surgery to reduce this risk.

 

 

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