Listen to Your Heart!

GWANGJU – For the second time in Universiade history, FISU and the ‘Check Your Heart’ programme will be offering up free heart checks. Located in the Athletes’ Village, athletes and staff are invited to visit the clinic for preventative measures.

By participating in the health and heart test, individuals will receive a height, weight and blood pressure check. Most importantly, an electro cardiogram and echocardiogram will be performed. Kyle Hornsby, a former Indiana University basketball player in the United States is now the lead doctor at the clinic in Gwangju. “It is a wonderful opportunity to be a part of this programme. It is a designed to screen athletes for life threatening conditions. We are not trying to find every little thing that could be wrong with an athlete. We are trying to find those conditions that happen to be very rare.”

Dr. Kyle Hornsby of the ‘Check Your Heart’ programme

In collaboration with test results, participants will have answered a health questionnaire asking about their sport, level of activity in training, and any symptoms they may be having. Once the data is collected, it is up to Hornsby to make decisions based on the results. “When they show up in clinic we make educated guesses on what their heart should and shouldn’t look like,” said Hornsby. “As you can imagine a Japanese rower’s heart is going to look slightly different from a South African soccer player’s heart versus an American heart who is a basketball player.”

The programme is unique, as no other testing has been performed on a large stage such as at the Universiade. Data collection at the games has served to be critical in this process as it is a platform where multi-sport variation exists. “After the games we will have stored all this data for a trend analysis. We are hoping that we will be able to see a correlation in physiological differences in varying sports and athletes.”

Hornsby expects to collect data for 2,000 athletes throughout the Universiade. Each individual who participates in tests will receive a USB drive that provides the results from their tests. Athletes’ testing results are divided into normal, minor abnormalities, abnormalities with a follow-up and disqualifying abnormalities that heavily recommend athletes to withdraw from competition.

FISU has intentions to continue this partnership with furthering research in this field.

Lizzy Whitbeck (USA), Young Reporter