Sudden-Death Symptoms Go Undetected in Routine Tests

The scenario is rare but always terrifying: A young athlete, seemingly in top shape, suddenly collapses and dies.

The reasons may be just as frightening: More often than not, symptomless, hard-to-detect and unpreventable heart abnormalities are to blame, according to a new, detailed profile of the victims.

Most had passed routine medical screenings, according to a report Tuesday in a special Journal of the American Medical Assn. issue devoted to sports medicine and the Olympics.

Though the problem is rare, “it’s always a horror story,” said Dr. William Roberts, a co-researcher and director of the Baylor Cardiovascular Institute in Dallas.

The sudden deaths of several well-known athletes have focused attention on the phenomenon. Hank Gathers, a star forward at Loyola Marymount, collapsed and died on the court during a game in 1990 after being sidelined for a while because of his heart condition.

And Olympic figure skating gold medalist Sergei Grinkov died during a practice session last year at age 28. Grinkov, a Russian whose father died at 52, was found to have inherited a genetic condition that caused his death.

The American Heart Assn. plans to release new screening guidelines for young athletes next month. The guidelines will recommend more detailed screenings of athletes with family histories of heart disease, and researchers suggest that young athletes with serious heart defects abstain from competitive sports.

Among high school competitors, only one in about 200,000 athletes succumbs to such sudden deaths, according to researchers, who studied 158 sudden deaths nationwide among young competitive athletes between 1985 and 1995, and focused on 134 that were later linked to heart problems.