The Heart and Research Foundation has launched a collection of donations to better determine the origin of the athlete’s sudden death. The ex-footballer Laurent Huard, trainer at Paris Saint Germain has also recently confided how this heart disease which he survived changed his life.
Former footballer Laurent Huard, coach at Paris Saint Germain, recently confided in the Parisian about his health problems. In 2002, the sportsman loses consciousness on the ground. He remains unconscious for a minute, with tremors and convulsions. The former player suffered a heart attack, also known as ‘sudden sportsman’s death’.
This disease, which affects around 1,000 professionals and amateurs, reveals a silent cardiac anomaly which can prove fatal during physical exertion. These premature deaths, which generally occur before the age of 35, remain difficult to diagnose. Indeed, the existence of the heart defect remains most often ignored.
Laurent Huard, now 45, suffered from “arrhythmogenic dysplasia of the right ventricle”. A diagnosis that abruptly put an end to his career in the field. “I did not want to believe it. I consulted other doctors, asked for second opinions, in vain, the diagnosis was the same”, he tells our colleagues from the Parisian.
Laurent Huard now wears an automatic defibrillator implanted in his chest, to avoid any risk of discomfort. This device will save his life in 2012, explains the athlete on a daily basis, when he suffered a new episode of tachycardia.
Obesity, smoking and diabetes are also risk factors
According to’Health Medicine and Sports Wellness Research Institute, “40,000 to 60,000 deaths per year in France are due to cardiac arrest, with a survival rate not exceeding 3%”. The Heart and Research Foundation recently launched a fundraising to fund research to better understand the factors behind these deaths.
According to an American study published on April 10, 2018 in the journal Traffic, conducted on 3,775 sudden deaths, 186 (5%) occurred in young people, aged on average 25.9 years. Less than a third of sudden deaths in young adults have warning symptoms before the event.
Also according to this study, sports activity is only a triggering event in 14% of cases. The diseases most frequently linked to sudden death in young adults are heart rhythm disorders (31%), coronary insufficiency (22%) and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (14%).
Among the young people in the study who had suffered a sudden death, we find a high frequency of classic cardiovascular risk factors (obesity, diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, smoking). With at least one factor observed in 58% of cases, obesity being the most common.
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