![]() ![]() teens and preteens (ages 12 through 17) have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine so far, the CDC says.Įva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images “If these people are going to be our role models and a source of aspiration and inspiration for our youth and expected to push themselves to their limits I think we should be doing something at least to protect them from sudden death,” he said.A teen gets a dose of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine last month at Holtz Children's Hospital in Miami. A review in the British Medical Journal in 2016 said its efficacy has not been supported by the evidence. Some argue that screening is a waste of time, he said. Sharma is a consultant to the board of the charity CRY (Cardiac Risk in the Young) which offers free heart screening. MasterChef contestant Matt Campbell, 29, for instance, collapsed and died in this year’s London marathon. Sudden heart-related deaths in young people occur in other sports. Sharma is in favour of screening for other athletes as well. That could be true but we don’t know that,” said Sharma. You could argue that those people may never have died if they carried on. “Some people were disqualified from the sport, so their dreams were taken away from them. Most – 30 out of the 42 – had surgery or other treatment for their heart defect and were able to go back to playing football, but the other 12 stopped playing. Of these players, 42 (0.38%) had cardiac diseases that could cause sudden cardiac death. “The death of a young athlete is highly tragic when one considers that most deaths are due to congenital electrical or structural diseases of the heart that are detectable during life.”īetween 19, more than 11,000 players filled in a health questionnaire, and were given a physical examination, 12-lead ECG and echocardiography. “What it told us firstly was that death rates were higher than had been anticipated and secondly that a one-off screening at the age of 16, which was what the FA were doing, is not enough and that we would probably have to do serial assessments if we are going to identify some of these guys, because they died around seven years after they had been screened. ![]() “What surprised us the most was that of the eight deaths that did occur, six had completely normal screens at the age of 16. “That was threefold greater than any study has ever reported in the past and that did surprise us,” he said. He and his team, who have published their results in the New England Journal of Medicine, found a death rate of one in 14,700 people – considerably higher than the previous estimates of one in 50,000 or one in 200,000, said Sharma. The review of this data was led by Sanjay Sharma, professor of inherited diseases and sports cardiology at St George’s University of London and chair of the expert cardiac committee of the Football Association. The programme now has 20 years of comprehensive data. The tests are part of a fitness assessment that is mandatory for all academy soccer players aged 16 or 17 before they sign a professional contract. The occasional such tragedy among football players led the FA in 1997 to set up the screening programme. In 2012, Bolton Wanderers star Fabrice Muamba, 23, had a cardiac arrest on the pitch during an FA Cup tie against Tottenham Hotspur and nearly died. An autopsy found he had a hereditary heart condition. The midfielder collapsed while playing for his country against Colombia in France during the 2003 FIFA Confederations Cup. ![]() There have been a number of shocking deaths among young football stars, including that of Cameroonian international Marc-Vivien Foé, 28, who played in the Premier League. In the light of the findings, the FA has increased the number of cardiac assessments that young footballers are given from one to three, at the ages of 16, 18 and 20.
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