Follow e-Spurs on Twitter here!Article be e-Spurs Writer Johnny Murwill (UK)
While all attention and interest is unsurprisingly on the latest transfer rumours in the off-season, this article casts the memory back to the 2011/12 season.
On the 17th of March, 2012, Spurs fans were watching with frustration as Tottenham were drawing 1-1 with Bolton in the quarter final of the FA cup. Around the 41st minute, Fabrice Muamba collapsed to the ground and medical staff were called onto the pitch. His heart had stopped. As it became clear Muamba’s condition was serious, the usual buzz and chants heard among both sets of fans quickly subsided into a shocked hush.
Muamba somehow survived, but his miraculous story is one that is seldom-heard in either football or the wider world. While his case had a feel-good factor in its conclusion, the deaths of Marc Vivien Foé, Antonio Puerta and Phil O’Donnell highlight the end which often awaits such incidents.
Such sporadic deaths may appear to be random tragedies, but in fact these footballers have all carried conditions which are labelled under the umbrella term Sudden Death Syndrome. Furthermore, while high profile cases seem few and far between, it is a condition which claims the lives of 12 young people a week in the UK.
Conditions vary from Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, in which excessive thickening of the heart muscle develops, to Brugada’s syndrome, and Ion Channelopathy disorder in which death can occur simply in sleep. Symptoms include chest pain, blackouts, breathlessness which is disproportionate to the amount of exercise undertaken, palpitations and dizziness.
And this is where football and sport in general comes into the equation. Because while it seems like a tragic irony that the condition proves most vulnerable amongst the young and physically fit, this is not a tragic coincidence. Research shows that 90% of victims die during or immediately after exercise.
This article is not to scaremonger. The benefits of regular healthy exercise are undoubted, and should never be put off with sedentary lifestyles increasingly common. However, as strenuous exercise is a trigger, awareness of the condition is of vital importance. While screening programmes cannot guarantee that conditions will be picked up, their effectiveness is undoubted. In Italy, all competitive sports teams must be screened by law – and these efforts have lead to a 90% reduction in death rates.
Last year a somewhat miraculous recovery was experienced in Fabrice Muamba. 12 young people a week are not so lucky.
For more information, visit www.c-r-y.org.uk.
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very interesting. hopefully some young sportsmen and sportswomen will get themselves screened for heart defects, many of which can be caught on screening and treated.
ReplyDeletethe sooner the government catches on to the importance of this screening, the better for so many families in the UK.