Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography
Clinical InvestigationCardiac Effects of Athletic TrainingRight Atrial and Ventricular Adaptations to Training in Male Caucasian Athletes: An Echocardiographic Study
Section snippets
Study Population
This was a prospective study designed and performed in Thessaloniki, in northern Greece, during the peak competitive seasons of 2011 and 2012. After contacting the National Federations of Sports as well as sports physicians and coaches of the top-level sports teams in northern Greece, asking to recruit athletes competing in national-level and international-level training in our region, 108 Caucasian male top-level athletes in different sport disciplines volunteered to participate in our study.
Basic Demographic and Standard LV Morphologic Parameters
Age, anthropometric data, clinical characteristics, and performance measures of the study population are shown in Table 1. No significant differences concerning age and body habitus parameters between athletes and controls were recorded. As expected, athletes presented, because of exercise-induced remodeling, greater internal dimensions (LV end-diastolic diameter and volume) and LV mass index compared with controls (LV end-diastolic diameter, 5.3 ± 0.35 cm in EAs vs 5 ± 0.38 cm in SAs vs
Discussion
Systematic training imposes a wide range of adaptations, structural and functional, affecting both ventricles and atria.1, 2 Concerning the right ventricle, geometric remodeling secondary to systematic training has been described in previous studies, while ambiguous results exist regarding deformation and diastolic function of the right ventricle among athletes, suggesting that observed changes could be attributed either to an acquired right cardiomyopathy secondary to long-term intensive
Conclusions
Systematic training imposes physiologic, morphologic, and functional adaptations on the right ventricle and right atrium. Despite differences in geometric remodeling among different subsets of athletes (EAs vs SAs, highly vs moderately trained athletes, with or without RV dilatation) and untrained controls, few meaningful differences in right cardiac cavity deformation and relaxation exist, suggesting that RV and RA systolic and diastolic function in athletes, irrespective of sport discipline,
Acknowledgments
We thank all the athletes and healthy volunteers participating in the study. Additionally, we thank Vourdounis Nikos and Dimitrakopoulos Ioannis, local GE staff members, for their continuous technical support with EchoPAC software, along with the nurses and aid personnel of the Third Cardiology Department's Acute Coronary Unit for their commitment to completion of the current research protocol.
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Dr. Pagourelias has received a postdoctoral research scholarship from the Research Committee of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.