I'm having worries about cardiac arrest/sudden death again...need advice, please?

[Mark_P]

Okay, so I thought the worries had gone and I was getting on with my life fine. But I recently heard that someone suffered a cardiac arrest in the olympics or something to do with it, and they were only 26. I am almost 24 years old and I workout 5-6 days a week, so obviously I'm a little concerned again. It's always in the back of my mind and I can't workout 100% at the moment.

I previously suffered from panic attacks and went to hospital last year and then again at the beginning of this year. I had multiple tests including ECG's, Echo-Cardiogram, and I wore a heart monitor for 48 hours. All the results came back fine, but I'm still concerned in case I train too much and have issues with my heart.

Anyone been in a similar situation?

[Tony1980]

I think when someone in the sporting world has a cardiac arrest and it gets brought into the fore of news reports it makes us all worry. But for every one person that suffers this, a few million others will have no problems. I think you probably refer to Dale Oen (?sic) the ?Norwegian swimmer who died before the Olympics. Mostly, it's ethnicity linked with structural heart problems which cause these sudden deaths. If your Echo was normal then you probably have very little to worry about. Exercise actually rids the heart (temporarily) of rhythm abnormalities in some cases too.