My son is a professional athlete and undergoes very heavy training, which makes me worry about his health. I read that too much physical activity can be dangerous for the heart in kids. It’s really like this?
He replies Andrea Baggianohead of Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Unit, Monzino Cardiology Center, Milan
Physical exercise carried out with high intensity, duration and frequency, as in the case of professional athletes, involves an inevitable need for the body, and therefore also for the cardiovascular system, to adapt to the demands that the exercise itself entails. Depending on whether the sport practiced involves dexterity/posture, power, resistance, or with mixed characteristics, the athlete’s heart response will have different specifications. For example, in power sports, a minimal increase in heart rate during exercise will occur instead a significant increase in blood pressure and this will mean that the walls of the cardiac muscle will be thicker, while the volumes of the cardiac chambers will only be slightly enlarged.
Response to a stimulus
Conversely, in endurance sports you will have a marked increase in heart rate during exercise, a smaller increase in blood pressure and the heart will appear to be made up of clearly larger chambers than those present in sedentary subjects. The adaptations of the heart just mentioned do not therefore represent a pathological condition, but they are a simple response to a stimulus and this is why the definition of “athlete’s heart” is used. In the field of sports medicine it has therefore become important to discriminate, with a reasonable degree of certainty, between the physiological adaptations present in the “athlete’s heart” and the morphological and functional variations typical of cardiac pathologies, such as hypertrophic, dilated or arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathieswhich in some cases can simulate cardiac changes in the heart of a healthy athlete.
Intercept anomalies
The high load of physical exercise can also make the presence of an underlying heart disease and therefore, intense physical activity may be more than a real cause the “unmasker” of a pre-existing heart problemas shown in 2023 in the scientific journal Circulation by a group of Australian researchers in a cohort of 281 endurance athletes. Professional athletes undergo a series of medical tests on an annual basis precisely to monitor how the body adapts to the demands imposed by physical exercise; thanks to this screening it is possible detect any anomalies early which, fortunately, only in a small percentage of cases will be found to be determined by the presence of a cardiac pathology.
