ABSTRACT
A recent study of 29 competitive athletes aged 13 to 31 years dying suddenly disclosed that 28 of them died from cardiovascular conditions, the most common being hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.1Atherosclerotic coronary heart disease was the cause of death in three. Recently the authors studied the heart in a young man who died while walking back to the huddle after having run a pass pattern in a professional football game. By the next day, the pain had nearly disappeared without the patient’s having received any medicines, and on September 7 he was discharged. Because of fever at home, he was rehospitalized on September 9. The serum lactic dehydrogenase was elevated. The results of intravenous pyelogram, selective splenic and renal angiograms, and studies of renal function (to rule out splenic rupture) were normal. The unusual anatomic feature about the epicardial coronary arteries in this patient was the extensiveness of the hemorrhages into the atherosclerotic plaques.
