Abstract
Athlete’s heart (AH) is the result of morphological and functional cardiac modifications due to long-lasting athletic training. Athletes can develop very marked structural myocardial changes, which may simulate or cover unknown cardiomyopathies. The differential diagnosis between AH and cardiomyopathy is necessary to prevent the risk of catastrophic events, such as sudden cardiac death, but it can be a challenging task. The improvement of the imaging modalities and the introduction of the new technologies in cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) and cardiac computed tomography (CCT) can allow overcoming this challenge. Therefore, the radiologist, specialized in cardiac imaging, could have a pivotal role in the differential diagnosis between structural adaptative changes observed in the AH and pathological anomalies of cardiomyopathies. In this review, we summarize the main CMR and CCT techniques to evaluate the cardiac morphology, function, and tissue characterization, and we analyze the imaging features of the AH and the key differences with the main cardiomyopathies.
Highlights
Physical exercise is useful to prevent many cardiovascular diseases, limiting several risk factors for heart pathologies and reducing the incidence of fatal ischemic events due to coronary artery disease [1]
This retrospective technique allows the evaluation of any cardiac phase and it is useful in patients with high or irregular heart rhythm and, even if it is associated with relatively high radiation doses, it allows with the same acquisition the evaluation of the coronary artery disease [8,29]
ExcludeAlthough the possibility of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). For these reasons, considering the actual clinical evidence, the detection of late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) favors the diagnosis of HCM, the absence does not even if current guidelines recommend only fibrosis evaluation, comprehensive exclude the possibility of HCM
Summary
Physical exercise is useful to prevent many cardiovascular diseases, limiting several risk factors for heart pathologies and reducing the incidence of fatal ischemic events due to coronary artery disease [1]. Athletes commonly carry out intensive and excessive physical activity much more than the recommended usual quantity of healthy subjects For this reason, athletes have a 2.4 to 4.5 increased risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD) and about. Long-lasting athletic training causes cardiac heart overload and it results in morphological and functional cardiovascular adaptations of cardiac chambers, called athlete’s heart (AH). These adaptive modifications are physiological responses to the hemodynamic demands of increased cardiac output but, frequently, overlap with cardiac diseases and the differential diagnosis between AH and cardiomyopathies is a challenging task [4,5,6].
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