Brief report: healed myocarditis as a cause of ventricular repolarization abnormalities in athlete's heart.

In the past myocarditis has been suggested as a possible cause of repolarization abnormalities in sportsmen, but, to our knowledge, no direct in-vivo demonstration of this relationship has so far been found. We report the cases of three professional athletes with repolarization changes at rest and/or during exercise and mild segmental wall motion anomalies in the left ventricle on echocardiography, in whom myocarditis was diagnosed by non-invasive and invasive clinical investigations, including endomyocardial biopsy. We think that probably the frequency with which myocarditis is responsible for electrocardiographic and echocardiographic abnormalities in athletes has so far been underestimated, and that caution must be employed when interpreting minor segmental wall motion abnormalities on resting and exercise echocardiograms in trained subjects as being due to athlete's hart, especially when they present with repolarization changes.

Echocardiographic size of conductance vessels in athletes and sedentary people.

The purpose of the present study was to assess the size of great and medium caliber arterial and venous vessels (conductance vessels) in athletes of different sports and sedentary people. Vessel size was measured by two-dimensional echocardiography in 15 professional cyclists, 15 highly-trained long-distance runners, 15 professional volley-ball players, 10 wheelchair basketball players, 11 wheelchair distance runners and 20 sedentary controls. The following vessels were imaged and measured: aortic arch, left carotid and left subclavian artery, right pulmonary artery, abdominal aorta and mesenteric artery, superior and inferior vena cava. Vessel size was considered in absolute value and normalized for body surface area (BSA). Among the able-bodied athletes, both cyclists and long-distance runners showed a generalized increase in vessels size in respect to controls, either absolute or normalized for BSA. The increase was highly significant for normalized inferior vena cava: cyclists, mean 15.1 mm, 95% confidence intervals 14.2 to 15.8 mm; long-distance runners, 15.8 mm, 15.3 to 16.4; controls, 10.5 mm, 9.8 to 11.3. Volleyball players also showed larger vessels than controls, but this feature was clearly related to their greater body size because statistical differences were attenuated or abolished by normalization for BSA. Wheelchair athletes exhibited significantly larger upper-body vessels but significantly smaller lower-body vessels than controls when normalized for BSA. In addition, wheelchair distance runners, who trained more intensively, had larger abdominal aorta and inferior vena cava than wheelchair basket players. Long-term endurance training leads to a generalized increase in arterial and venous conductance vessels size.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)