The authors advocate for on-site point-of-care testing for serum chemistries as a standard of care to guide initial management and triage of endurance athletes with exertional collapse.
Exertional collapse in endurance athletes during competition is potentially lifethreatening. Beyond dysregulation of body temperature, which can be readily diagnosed and treated based on physical examination, changes in intravascular volume and tonicity of extracellular fluids may result in hyponatremic encephalopathy with acute cerebral edema. As with deployment of automated external defibrillators to treat rare cases of cardiac arrest in athletes, on-site point-of-care testing for serum chemistries should become the standard of care to guide initial management and triage of critically ill athletes to hospital-based emergency medical facilities.
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Arthur J. Siegel (2002) studied this question.
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