A well-beloved high school basketball
player clinches the championship for his varsity team only to die of heart
failure hours later. A promising football player suffers a sudden heart attack
during a game and dies after being in a coma for several weeks. These are sad
stories about young people who are supposed to be on the road to much, much
greater things, but their journey ended prematurely because of their heavy
involvement in and love for sports. But what’s even more troubling is that such
cases are becoming increasingly frequent.
Medical experts claim that over the
last five years, hundreds of high school athletes, in America alone, die of
sudden cardiac arrest due to undetected heart defects. Indeed, it’s difficult
to monitor young people’s health and older folks tend to see them as invincible
creatures because their bodies are still young. It’s worth mentioning as well
that medical check-ups for high school athletes do not reveal so much about the
structural abnormalities of the heart caused by the combination of the strain
and stress of sports training and genetic factors.
Intense sports training (such as for
football, basketball, or baseball), even for young hearts, can prove to be too
much to bear, especially for those who come from families with a history of
heart disease. Therefore, it’s imperative for schools and the local community to
impose a thorough screening program for the young athletes’ cardiac health,
which should include EKG and echocardiogram. With these two screening
processes, promising young athletes can take better care of their heart and
their future sporting career — and, most important of all, there’ll be fewer
untimely deaths. Now, if schools do not have the financial funds to cover these
screening procedures for their athletes, parents then should take the
responsibility of making sure their children who are heavily involved in sports
are tested properly – it’s always better to be safe than sorry.
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