Researchers Kimberly G. Harmon, MD, and Jonathan A. Drezner, MD, from the University of Washington have challenged the position taken by Barry Maron, MD, and colleagues of the Minneapolis Heart Institute in a letter to the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association published on April 28.
They state: "In a Viewpoint on cardiovascular screening, Dr. Maron and colleagues argued that sudden cardiac death in athletes is rare, and therefore resources should be directed away from cardiovascular screening and toward other public health initiatives. Examples from Denmark were used to support the case. We assert that the statistical comparisons presented were not accurate.
"In an effort to convey proportionality, statistics on suicides and motor vehicle crashes from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were compared with statistics from the US National Registry of Sudden Death in Athletes, which are disparate sources with different populations and data collection methods. The CDC draws from state-reported population statistics, whereas the registry is a voluntary report of athlete cases. In the CDC data from 2012, motor vehicle crashes were 7.2 times and suicide 5 times more frequent than death from heart disease in the 15- to 24-year-old age group, not 150 and 60 times as stated in the article by Maron and colleagues." More...
In his reply, Dr. Maron states:
To clarify the first point raised by Drs Harmon and Drezner, cardiovascular sudden deaths in high school– and college-aged competitive athletes have proved to be uncommon based on a reported incidence of 1:80 000 to 1:200 000 in most published population studies and summarized in the recent American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology Scientific Statement. Certainly, each of these events in young people is tragic, but to somehow characterize these deaths as common and representative of a major public health problem lacks proportionality and is potentially misleading. More...
SOURCE: JAMA