The young athlete's heart: An electrocardiographic challenge

The sudden cardiac death (SCD) of a young athlete is a catastrophic event. To try to prevent a young SCD the Lausanne cardiac screening protocol has been proposed in 2006. One of the main foci is the electrocardiogram (ECG) of the athlete. To try to differentiate between normal ECG findings in athletes and ECG findings that could be a signs of possible underlying cardiac pathology, six ECG criteria have been proposed since 2006 with the latest published in 2017 (International criteria). With this thesis we wanted to study the impact of the different ECG criteria on our population and of the individual characteristic on athletes’ ECG and their consequences for cardiac screening. In this thesis results of the use of different ECG criteria in our population are presented. Also the impact of the athlete’s characteristics age, sex and sport exposure on their ECG are studied. We concluded that we still use many rather undifferentiated ranges of reference values while there is increasing evidence for different norm distribution based on patients’ or athletes’ characteristics. We therefore recommended a form of personalised medicine in which norm values are more differentiated and more individualised to fit the patient and/or athlete.