This review highlights the multifactorial nature of the athlete's heart, emphasizing that echocardiographic interpretation must account for sporting discipline, training volume, ethnicity, and body size to accurately differentiate physiological adaptation from cardiomyopathy.
The manifestations of the athlete's heart can create diagnostic challenges during an echocardiographic assessment. The classifications of the morphological and functional changes induced by sport participation are often beyond 'normal limits' making it imperative to identify any overlap between pathology and normal physiology. The phenotype of the athlete's heart is not exclusive to one chamber or function. Therefore, in this narrative review, we consider the effects of sporting discipline and training volume on the holistic athlete's heart, as well as demographic factors including ethnicity, body size, sex, and age.
Flanagan et al. (Wed,) studied this question.