{"id":47758,"date":"2015-04-06T16:53:52","date_gmt":"2015-04-06T20:53:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/?post_type=news&#038;p=47758"},"modified":"2015-05-15T17:08:33","modified_gmt":"2015-05-15T21:08:33","slug":"scd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/2015\/04\/06\/scd\/","title":{"rendered":"Cardiac Arrest During Exercise in Middle-Aged People"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dropping dead while exercising is a common fear, especially among middle-aged men. Unfortunately there have been limited data on the precise rate of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) in middle-aged people and little understanding about the medical history of the victims of SCA. Now a new study\u00a0<em><\/em>fills in some important gaps in knowledge and\u00a0shows that this fear is largely misplaced, given the small risk that exercise will lead to sudden cardiac death in most middle-aged people.<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/circ.ahajournals.org\/content\/early\/2015\/03\/17\/CIRCULATIONAHA.114.011988.abstract\">a paper published in\u00a0<\/a><em><a href=\"http:\/\/circ.ahajournals.org\/content\/early\/2015\/03\/17\/CIRCULATIONAHA.114.011988.abstract\">Circulation<\/a>,<\/em> researchers scrutinized all SCA cases in people 35-65 years old in the Portland, Oregon area over a ten year period\u00a0\u2014 the first such analysis performed in the United States, say the authors.\u00a0Over the study period there were only 67 cases of sport-related SCA in the study population, representing only 5% of the total 1,247 SCA events in middle-aged people.\u00a0This is &#8220;a fact that is likely to encourage sports activities among middle-aged athletes,&#8221; the authors wrote.<\/p>\n<p>A second important finding is that nearly two-thirds of the people who had SCA had previous cardiovascular symptoms or had been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease. This finding &#8220;suggests that utilization of educational and general awareness approaches may further decrease sports-associated SCA burden.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Middle-aged men were 18 times more likely to have a sport-associated SCA than women. The authors estimated that in the overall middle-aged U.S. population 2,269 men would have an event each year, compared with only 136 women. They speculated that this difference may be due to &#8220;inherent sex differences&#8221; or differences in the rate of participation or the vigor and duration of exercise.<\/p>\n<p>The authors emphasized that the small increase in short-term risk associated with exercise is almost certainly outweighed by &#8220;the long-term benefits of regular exercise on cardiovascular health.&#8221; They said &#8220;the findings from this study should in no way discourage patients with cardiovascular risk factors from engaging in regular, appropriate physical exercise within a framework of simple guiding rules from the treating physician.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dropping dead while exercising is a common fear, especially among middle-aged men. Unfortunately there have been limited data on the precise rate of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) in middle-aged people and little understanding about the medical history of the victims of SCA. Now a new study\u00a0fills in some important gaps in knowledge and\u00a0shows that this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,1,7],"tags":[317,749,1827,897],"class_list":["post-47758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electrophysiology","category-general","category-prevention","tag-cardiac-arrest","tag-exercise","tag-sports","tag-sudden-cardiac-death"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}