Junior athletic heart: insights from echocardiography

Abstract

Athlete’s heart is a constellation of structural and functional changes that occur in the heart of people who participate in sports. The echocardiographic assessment of athlete’s heart can be a challenging. Although it would seem that the huge cardiac capacity of the trained athlete should be easily distinguishable from heart disease, there are several instances in which exercise-induced “physiological” myocardial remodeling, including changes in ventricular chamber size and wall thickness, can mimic pathological structural changes associated with inherited and acquired cardiac disorders.  The relationship between different sports types and cardiac structures especially in adults has been investigated in many previous studies. However, there are few studies in children