Weightlifting makes your heart explode?

[Johnka]

This is an awful thing to happen to anyone, but let's hope this study doesn't lead to fearmongering. 31 documented cases out of how many millions of people who lift?

I wonder how many people have undetected aneurysms?

http://www.sciencentral.com/articles...e_id=218392825

Weightlifting Death Risk

Scientists are calling for widespread heart screening of people before they begin weight training. That's based on new evidence that lifting more than half your body weight could put you at risk of sudden death, as this ScienCentral News video explains.

Strong Evidence

"They wanted let me go home ... They gave me the option to stay but said 99 percent I'd be fine to go home ... They wanted me to come back the following day for a stress test," Bill Linski recalls. He was only 21 years old and in great shape from his 6-day-a-week gym workouts when intense chest pains sent him to his local hospital emergency room. Luckily, he let his mom decide. She thought he should stay.

It turned out that pumping iron earlier that day had pumped up Linski's blood pressure, which caused a tear in his aorta, the heart's main artery. He was airlifted to Yale New Haven Hospital where surgeon John Elefteriades performed lifesaving surgery.

Sadly, Elefteriades says similar scenarios all too often end in the death of a healthy young man. "A problem and a tragedy arises in the fact that it's uncommon for physicians to think of an internal tear of the aorta in healthy young athletes," Elefteriades says.

In 2003, he and his team wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association that they'd noticed a pattern: five young patients, including Linski, with torn aortas following heavy lifting. All had a previously undetected aneurysm, or enlargement of the aorta.

Now, they report even stronger evidence of this association in the journal Cardiology, where they've documented that link in 31 patients.

"Of the 31 patients," says Elefteriades, "10 of them are dead."
He's grateful to family members who contacted him and allowed him to investigate the deaths of their loved ones. "Through the generosity of families who shared their stories with me ... I've heard the most tear-wrenching accounts," he says.His team's new recommendations are based solely on trying to prevent such terrible losses, he says. "For heavy strength training involving weight lifting or similar activities like pushups, we're recommending screening for unknown or undetected aortic aneurysm."

Elefteriades says that includes people who do heavy lifting on the job, and that the team defines heavy lifting as more than half your body weight.
The screening test they recommend is a heart echo exam, technically called transthoracic echocardiography, also commonly called a heart ultrasound. It's "a very simple test which is painless, it's fun to have and relatively inexpensive," he says.

"I recognize that there are serious social and especially economic implications of making such a recommendation, and that depends on other aspects of our healthcare system whether the echo can be made generally available and whether echo exams can be paid for," says Elefteriades. "The alternative is to accept that every year we will lose some young athletes because of unknown enlargement of their aorta."

Aneurysms: An Inherited Risk

Elefteriades and his colleagues say aneurysms kill more Americans than AIDS largely because they go undetected and undiagnosed until a catastrophic tear occurs. Detecting them means patients can have preventive surgery before it's too late. Their ongoing research has uncovered a big clue to detecting them -- they tend to run in families.

The authors say that intense aerobic activity such as playing tennis or racquetball can also put stress on an enlarged aorta, but the biggest risk is strenuous lifting because it produces such big rises in blood pressure. While normal blood pressure is around 120 over 80, when the team measured their own blood pressure as they were lifting weights, "We were able to find blood pressure can go up as high as 300, 320, 330 millimeters of mercury," says Elefteriades. "That's much higher than we find in any type of natural disease state." If the activity does not involve lifting "more than about half of your body weight in a leg press or a bench press or other similar activity, you will not see these astronomical rises in blood pressure," he adds.
Elefteriades, who enjoys weightlifting, notes that he and his team strongly encourage weight training to maintain muscle mass and bone health. "The only proviso is that we recommend that you check your aorta by ultrasound to be sure it's not enlarged, so you can safely engage in the wonderful and important weightlifting activity," he says.

With his aorta repaired, Linski, now 28, can lift with no fear. "I went back to the gym six weeks and one day after surgery," he says. But it took him nearly four years to get back into shape. Under his doctors' guidance, he had to start out with five-pound dumbbells.

"It was painful in my sternum," he says. "Almost two and a half years I couldn't do much with my sternum because of the pulling and it just ached and it hurt and it took me a while to work through that."

It was also psychologically traumatic. Although his father died of a heart attack at 37 when Linksi was only eight, he never thought he could be struck down so young. Instead he had focused on exercise and health, and began bodybuilding at age 16. So when people at the gym would ask if he had had a heart attack, and mention the link of heart problems with steroid use, it bothered him a lot. "Why would I ever want to put something, with the history in my family and as I promote health, something that was foreign in my body, that would have any kind of adverse effect?" he asks.

Now looking forward to experiencing fatherhood, Linski hopes Elefteriades's research will spare others. "If I can say anything," he says, "I'm just extremely blessed and thank God every night."

Elefteriades' research was published in Cardiology online on July 14, 2006. His work was funded by Yale-New Haven Hospital, the Berkus Fund, and the Fariola Fund.

[Frank.S]

Oh wow I couldnt en get through all of that.

1/2 my bodyweight eh? Sorry guys im now limiting my deadlifts to the bar with a 25lbs plate on each side.

[Jean-Paul]

Some anecdotal support to this story... A young man of 25 who just came back from Irag, healthy and fit, was working out in a local gym a couple of months ago, just doing curls I (probably in a squat rack) and ripped a major artery in his heart. Died on the spot!

[Q.]

Originally Posted by Jean-Paul

Some anecdotal support to this story... A young man of 25 who just came back from Irag, healthy and fit, was working out in a local gym a couple of months ago, just doing curls I (probably in a squat rack) and ripped a major artery in his heart. Died on the spot!

... but what a way to go! I can only think of ONE better.

[mystery_bowler]

If recent history is any indication, my local news will pick up on this story with the following teaser:

Cue stock footage of average gym-goers...

"If you lift weights, your heart could explode! Could you be the next person to drop dead in the gym? Join us after the break."

[Lisa~]

That's hilarious Mystery Bowler! I can just hear the newscaster saying that!

Let's hope not, but sadly that is often how the news is reported.

[Lost Dog]

Statistics are funny things. I have a software package for my Palm PDA. Everytime there are upgrades, the forum for the software gets bombarded with comments about how the software did x (unrelated thing) to their PDA. The developer pointed out that with x number of users of his software, statistically, 25 of them would have heart attacks on the day he releases a new version. Later, they often find the "true" issue was unrelated.

Not a perfect comparison, but still...

[Alcoholiday]

i'm scared now.

i guess i'll just go eat my big macs and drink my liters of cola, because i don't want to die lifting weights.

[pjb923]

I thought this was a good place to share with anyone not following my workout log, a little of what I recently went through.

Last month I was in the middle of a strenuous 4 day a week routine and making some of the best gains of my life. While at rest, either sitting at my desk at work or before bed, I noticed that my heartbeat was irregular. It would beat a few times quickly and then pause for a second and I was constantly aware of my heart beating in my chest. The irregular beat is a condition that I had since I was younger, but it was never this bad. Something was different, and I wanted to get checked out.

I went to the doctor who told me to lay off any strenuous activity and caffeine until this was figured out. Over the course of almost a month I went through blood tests, an Echocardiogram, multiple electrocardiograms, and wore a holter monitor for a 24 hour period. Anyone interested in more detail can read it in my log (Time to get serious...) or check the link in my signature.
To make a long story short, my condition is nothing serious, and I was cleared to start training again.

I was fortunate enough to not have any serious issues, but your heart is not something you want to mess around with. The echocardiogram was actually fun for me. Being an engineer, I like to see how things work, and how often do we get to see our own heart beating in real time.

After reading this, I am really glad that I got myself checked out when I did. The peace of mind it brought me was worth every trip to the doctor.

[Lou Schuler]

I wrote about all this back in '03, when Dr. Elefteriades published his first "study." One of the five guys in that original group was doing push-ups!

Aortic dissection is a serious, often-fatal condition. But there's really no link to strength training. If it's going to blow, it's going to blow. For example, John Ritter died of an aortic dissection, and I don't think he was doing anything physical at the time.

I interviewed Elefteriades, and although he came off as a very nice man, he didn't seem to know much about research. I told him about case studies I found with a simple PubMed search, which he didn't seem to know how to do.

Then, through other contacts, I found out about a national registry for aortic dissections. (I think it was at a university in Michigan.) The doctor running it said that the dissections are so catastrophic but so unpredictable that it's hard for any researchers to find patterns. He started the database so everyone can find all the information in one place.

Then I asked him (the database director) the million-dollar question: "How many people in your registry suffered an aortic dissection while lifting weights?"

He didn't know of any.

I won't pretend to understand the physiology here, but one doctor tried to explain it to me. He said that the rise in blood pressure seen with strength training is counterbalanced by the fact you're holding your breath during the concentric phase of the lift. So you have pressure on the arterial walls from the inside, which is countered by pressure from the outside.

I ran that theory by Elefteriades, who said he didn't think it would work that way. He didn't think the lungs could generate any kind of pressure against the arteries at the point where they typically break. But, again, he was hearing it from me, not from the doctor who did the research.

[Ogedei]

Yeah pretty much what Lou said. How many people have these problems, and die from them who DON'T lift?

[gobbla]

A: isn't getting a checkup by your doctor recommended before you start any excersise regime.

which leads to

B: if you have a pre existing heart condition then mabey you need to take care of that.

stupid

[Newlife]

"That's based on new evidence that lifting more than half your body weight could put you at risk of sudden death, as this ScienCentral News video explains."

What about all the people who died from NOT working out?

[DrWheatie]

Even a pretty thorough pre-participation physical probably won't include an echocardiogram (which is the study used to detect aneurysms.) A pre-participation physical in an otherwise healthy person less than 40 (such as high school sports physicals) typically don't include much more than a thorough history, vitals signs and a physical exam. After 40 you'd consider an EKG or treadmill stress test.

As pre-participation physicals go I'd say 99% of problems are picked up by history. Any major tests are usually ordered only for those with a significant complaint (such as chest pain, shortness of breath etc. with exercise ) or some major history (family member with sudden cardiac death at age 35.) I've done high school/college sport physicals for 12 years and can remember 2 times I've ordered further testing for something I found during the physical exam. That's why you hear so many stories of athletes who have had normal physicals having some major event. Unless they were "lucky" enough to have symptoms before the major event or have some other family history etc. the problem probably won't be picked up.

[Mahler]

Failing to lift weights makes your whole body explode. LOL

[GG300]

In retrospect how many deaths are caused by obesirty and related diseases each year?