Cardiac Events in World-class Athletes: An Internet-based Study

International audiencePURPOSE: This study aimed at assessing the prevalence of adverse cardiac events, as identified in the media, in world-class athletes according to their sex and sports discipline. METHODS: All female and male’ athletes, from 30 individual Olympic sports, ranked in the international yearly top 10 between 2006-2018, were included. The name of each of them was associated in a Google search with selected key terms related to heart disease and/or acute cardiac events after their inclusion date. Global and sex-specific adverse cardiac event hazard function λ were calculated for each sport. Global and sex-specific prevalence of cardiac events were calculated, then compared (Fisher’s exact test) between all sports. RESULTS: From the 2471 athletes included, 15 cases of cardiac events (prevalence 0.61%) were reported; 2 sudden cardiac deaths (0.08%) occurred in male athletes. The other events were related to arrhythmic events (n = 13), mainly supra-ventricular arrhythmias (n = 9). All surviving athletes were able to continue their career, mostly after ablation procedure. Male endurance athletes accounted for 7 events among which 3 events occurred among short-distance triathletes. Events among women were comparatively rare (n = 4), and all were observed among short-distance triathletes. CONCLUSIONS: A relatively unexpected high prevalence of cardiac events in endurance elite athletes, was observed as compared to other sports, mainly in short-distance male and female triathletes. This raises the question of particular cardiovascular constraints in this discipline, and underlines the urge of international longitudinal follow-up studies in these kinds of athletes