Conferences & Webinars
CRY’s online International Medical Conference
Similarly to the rest of CRY’s events and fundraising during 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the CRY Conference had to move online, with presentations being broadcast live through the day. For the first time, on October 16, our annual conference was a virtual event, which offered delegates the opportunity to sign up to watch talks from some of the world’s leading experts in sports cardiology and young sudden cardiac death. While this was rather different from our typical annual conference in London, we still had a fantastic day of talks, with those watching getting involved during presentations by taking part in polls and answering questions, too. As always, we were pleased to share the insight and research of many leading experts, including some of CRY’s present and past Research Fellows. CRY Consultant Cardiologist Professor Sanjay Sharma began the day with his presentation, “Athlete’s heart or dilated cardiomyopathy; The role of exercise imaging”. Professor Sharma discussed methods of differentiating physiological increases in heart size from dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM).
As he pointed out to begin his talk, there is a lot of data about how this is done when dealing with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, but there is little data covering DCM. Professor Sharma looked at this topic in extensive detail, and discussed the value of using stress echocardiography due to
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Research Highlights 2020
its better diagnostic ability. Professor Thijs Eijsvogels from Nijmegen, Netherlands, who is an associate professor at the Radboud University medical centre, gave the second presentation of the day. Professor Eijsvogels looked closely at troponin release following endurance exercise in athletes and what it means. He discussed how exercise-induced increases in troponin are very common following endurance exercise even though the degree of increase can vary significantly depending on the individual, as well as some findings that require more research. Next, former CRY Research Fellow Dr Aneil Malhotra talked about the challenges of screening in athletes, focusing on the black athlete’s heart. As Dr Malhotra noted at the beginning of his presentation, T-Wave inversion affects one in 30 young athletes and is six times more common in black athletes. T-Wave inversion is present in cardiomyopathy, which increases the risk of exercise-induced sudden cardiac death threefold.
Furthermore, as CRY research has shown, young sudden cardiac deaths are six times more common in young black footballers. This disparity is a problem, and Dr Malhotra went on to look at other conditions and research, as well as what studies need to be completed to help us truly understand the long-term implications of electrical and structural differences in the hearts of black, white and mixed race athletes. The next presentation of the day came from Professor Domenico Corrado, who has frequently spoken at the CRY Conference for many years now. Professor Corrado gave a
Cardiac Risk in the Young
