Estudio sobre muerte súbita en deportistas, 1985-1995

the relationship between the heart and its changes caused by exercise have been studied since 19th century, and since then various authors like niemela, kirsh and linzbach have analized the death in this particular group of people and found in the mayority alterations of the heart, coronary arteries with an important atherosclerotic component. this gave birth to the sportsman heart syndrome, wich is the physiologic adaptation of the cardiac muscle secondary to exercise, and it reflects in a global hipertrophy and bradicardial with normal arterial pressure. the sudden death on sportsmen is the one that occurs instantly during or a few minutes after doing exercise. filipides was the first person to die after running a marathon in athens in the year 490 b.c.. it was shown that sportsmen under 30 generally have a cardiovascular problem of congenital character and in persons above 30 years old have a severe atherosclerotic component. with this concepts in mind doctors valerio hernández, reyes guzmán and escobar yanes, analized 10 years of autopsies between january 1985 and july 1995, they analized over 19.359 autopsies, in wich 33 of the cases were due to sudden death on sportsmen. in all the cases it was put aside the trauma and it was done a histology study of the tissues. the year that presents more cases is 1994, and the mayority of them were from san josé. of these 33 cases, 32 were men, just one woman, 31 were white, and 2 were black. the major age group was between 26 and 30 years old. the youngest of all was a 12-year-old and the eldest was a 62-year-old, to a average age of 29. the most commo sport was soccer, due mainly to our culture, followed by athletism, swimming, bike raiding, basketball and motocross. according to the cause of death, 26 cases were from a cardiac origin (72%), 5 from cerebral origin (15%), and 2 from vascular origin (6%). confirming the literature facts about it, in the cases lower to 30 years old (11 cases), it was found a common death in