Battling Heart and Stroke

Many of us look to up to successful sports people and we can’t really imagine that some of them may also be fighting against heart disease like the rest of us. After all, physical exercise is supposedly the key to cardiovascular health.

Yet, there have been sudden deaths in past sports competition. According to Dr. Barry J. Maron of the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation, “about 125 athletes under 35 involved in organized sports die of sudden death in the United States each year…” The institute keeps a national registry of such fatalities and the majority of cases recorded were due to cardiac-related events.

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Major sports events are fun - but also dangerous for the heart and the blood vessels of the fans. I have just lived through another major sports tournament this year - the European Football Championships held in Switzerland (my current place of residence) and Austria .

Two years ago, it was the World Football Championships (known as THE WORLD CUP) in Germany (my place of residence then) that I could experience.

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We have all heard and used the idioms “my heart is racing”and “my heart missed a beat”. However, they are not just figures of speech. They happen literally  - with a condition called atrial fibrillation or AF for short.

The general term for irregular heartbeat is arrhythmia and AF is the most common form of arrhythmia in the United States, according to a recent review in the ScienceDaily. A normal adult heart at rest beats around 50 to 100 beats per minute. A heart with AF beats much faster and very irregularly, making it “race” and “miss a beat.” More →

Last May 21, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the government agency that is in charge of civil aviation safety issued a ban on the use of the smoking cessation drug varenicline by airline pilots and air traffic controllers, as reported by the New York Times.

The following day, on May 22, the US Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the agency in charge of safety in the interstate trucking and bus industry also issued the ban for bus and truck drivers.

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