Hospital da Luz Coimbra has now available a consultation of Sports Cardiology, coordinated by specialist physician Paulo Dinis. This consultation is destined to competition athletes, being also essential in the assessment of regular practitioners of sport or maintenance physical exercise. The benefits of physical exercise for health are largely proven, in healthy individuals, but also in cardiac pathology patients. It can, however, trigger acute events – including death –, justifying cardiovascular evaluation prior to sports practise. “The physiological adjustments induced by physical exercise can be hard to distinguish from cardiac pathology, namely concerning myocardiopathy, which may potentially evolve to tragic dysrhythmic events. The complementary diagnostic exams, electrocardiogram and others, should be interpreted according to specific criteria, considering the characteristics of the population under study. This evaluation, as well as the decision concerning adequacy for sports practice, require clinical experience and high level of differentiation”, highlights cardiologist Paulo Dinis. The range of physical exercise practitioners is presently quite wide, including all ages, from small children to elderly people. “All should be evaluated, but concerns regarding a teenager are different from those of a young adult (under 35 years old) or a veteran athlete. On the other hand, there are low-intensity modalities and extreme-intensity modalities, each of them requiring specialized follow-up”, further explains the cardiologist. Hospital da Luz Coimbra counts with a team prepared for a global evaluation of the athlete or occasional practitioner of sport, integrating specialists in the areas of diagnosis and treatment of cardiac pathologies (cardiac imaging, arrhythmology and electrophysiology, paediatric cardiology, interventional cardiology and cardiac rehabilitation). It equally performs the necessary complementary diagnosis exams, such as echocardiography, cardiopulmonary exercise testing, coronary CT angiography and cardiac MRI, among others.
