It is not usual for a young boy and a fit one to have a heart attack
The curious case of a 17-year-old footballer who landed at Mumbai’s Nanavati Hospital last week with chest pain, later diagnosed as a heart attack has confounded doctors. It is not usual for a young boy and a fit one at that to have a cardiac event but there are lessons in this for born again fitness enthusiasts who often take to running at a late stage in life.
While what happened to Puneet (name changed) will be clear only when doctors have made a few more tests, sudden cardiac deaths on the football field are not unknown. In 2004 Brazilian player Cristiano Junior shockingly died on the field after a collision with Mohunbagan goalkeeper Subrata Paul. The autopsy later showed that the 25-year-old Dempo player had suffered a cardiac arrest. In an article in The Physician and Sports Medicine in 2014, researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Centre recorded 54 instances of sudden cardiac death (SCD) on the football field from 2000-2013.
While most often there are underlying causes which could be genetic or related to undiagnosed conditions, for professional footballers the rigour of a training can trigger a cardiac event because of what in medical parlance is known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). According to the American Heart Association, HCM is when heart muscle cells enlarge and cause the walls of the ventricles (usually the left ventricle) to thicken. The ventricle size often remains normal, but the thickening may block blood flow out of the ventricle. If this happens, the condition is called obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The ventricles are the lower chambers of the heart that pump out blood from that organ to either the lungs for purification or to the rest of the body to supply it with oxygen. Sometimes the septum, the wall that divides the left and right sides of the heart, thickens and bulges into the left ventricle. This can block blood flow out of the left ventricle. Then the ventricle must work hard to pump blood. HCM is a common cause of cardiac arrest in young people including athletes, AHA says.
HCM clearly then is not just something that only footballers need to watch out for. Any person who starts exercising especially what are known as cardio training like running and swimming should not take symptoms like breathing difficulty, rapid heart rate or chest pain get a health checkup done immediately.. Any underlying issue even a mild hypertension could result in thickening of the heart walls and hasten a cardiac event.
