CHARTING HEART MUSCLE CHANGES IN NBA PLAYERS.

• Position: ELECTROCARDIOGRAMS - National Basketball Association

Building on research that established the first large-scale normative cardiac data set for basketball players (and athletes of similar size), cardiologists at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center compared electrocardiographic findings among National Basketball Association athletes with other published sports groups.

Results demonstrated that the criteria used to identify athletes at risk for exercise-triggered sudden cardiac death, known as the International Criteria, find a higher rate of false-positive results among NBA athletes, and may indicate a need for additional sport-specific guidelines to differentiate expected cardiac changes from abnormalities, maintain the findings published in JAMA Cardiology.

"Elite basketball players, like other elite athletes, are known to develop heart-muscle changes over time related to intensive athletic training, but there has not previously been a study that specifically analyzes ECG changes in this group," says sports cardiologist and senior author David J. Engel, associate professor of medicine at Columbia.

In the study, researchers analyzed the preseason electrocardiograms...