LT42 So, there’s a theory that there is an increased prevalence of structural cardiac anomalies in professional sports players, specifically one called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HOCM). This means the heart muscle is much thicker and might give an advantage to people with it in sports that require high intensity competition as the heart can pump harder and get more blood to the muscles. Unfortunately this increase in thickness can sometimes actually obstruct the blood getting out the heart and so players can collapse dead. Nowadays all professionals at this level have an ultrasound scan of the heart called echocardiography to look for this type of structural change, so people dying from it are pretty rare.
However the other main cause of sudden death/ collapse is an electrical issue with how the heart conducts nerve impulses to coordinate its contraction, and abnormalities of these sorts are much harder to pick up as the heart looks structurally normal on a scan. Some (e.g. Brugada, Wolff-Parkinson-White syndromes) have characteristic patterns on an electrical trace of the heart (an ECG) but most don’t get detected until something like this called a dysrhythmia occurs which can either manifest as an odd sensation where you notice your heart beat is not regular, dizziness (pre-syncope), fainting (syncope) or sudden death.
Most of these are actually asymptomatic and people will never know they have the condition.
