Monitoring Morphologic Changes in Male Rowers Using Limited Portable Echocardiography Performed by a Frontline Physician

Abstract

Athletes' hearts have been studied for adaptive changes in response to exercise. Physiologic changes are normal responses to intense athletic training regimens, whereas pathologic changes predispose athletes to sudden cardiac death. The two alterations overlap in clinical presentation. Research continues to investigate the upper limits of cardiac remodeling to aid clinical decision making. Studying normal changes that occur in response to exercise will advance physicians' understanding of physiologic responses to exercise and potentially improve clinical distinction. To expand this body of knowledge, we present an observational case series that describes morphologic changes in athlete's hearts concurrent with performance measurements.

The Athlete’s Heart and Machine Learning: A Review of Current Implementations and Gaps for Future Research

“…"Wearables" was the smallest single group with fou (14%) studies [20,25,28,37]. The final six (21%) unassigned studies [4,19,24,33,36,39] wer Of the 49 studies that remained, 1 study was excluded from the review due to issues with accessing the full manuscript, leaving 48 studies to be included for full-text readings and to form the dataset for this review. However, during the full-text readings, a further 20 studies were excluded: 16 were excluded as they were deemed to be not relevant to the review, and the other 4 were excluded due to concerns about their quality, i.e., being vague and having an unclear description of either their methodology or approach used to develop their models, how the evaluation criteria were presented, and why certain metrics were used over others.…”

“…However, during the full-text readings, a further 20 studies were excluded: 16 were excluded as they were deemed to be not relevant to the review, and the other 4 were excluded due to concerns about their quality, i.e., being vague and having an unclear description of either their methodology or approach used to develop their models, how the evaluation criteria were presented, and why certain metrics were used over others. After all the exclusions had been applied, this left a final total of 28 studies that were considered for this review [4,.…”

“…"Wearables" was the smallest single group with four (14%) studies [20,25,28,37]. The final six (21%) unassigned studies [4,19,24,33,36,39] were placed in the "Others" group as they did not meet the inclusion criteria for the previous groups. The studies within this group are focused on using methods that can be applied to a dataset to attribute one of two or more classes to each patient or participant.…”

“…Dockerill et al [33] utilised a case series approach to assess the hearts of 27 runners before and after an extreme running event whilst documenting the changes in the cardiac structure caused by an acute bout of exercise. Similarly, Kerkhof et al [4] investigated the changes in the heart of a select group: three division one undergraduate crew athletes explored the use of 'focused' echocardiography in screening athletes to assess their heart health and function.…”

“…Exercise is one of the best methods for improving health and reducing the cardiovascular risk factors [3]. However, extreme exercise regimes, such as those followed by athletes, cause physiological changes in the heart to help it cope with the increased demands placed upon it [4]. These physiological changes, also known as the "athlete's heart", can cause issues as they are difficult to distinguish from pathological changes, exposing athletes to sudden cardiac death [4].…”