Luca is 17 and lives for athletics. He imagines his future on the track, competing with the stopwatch and opponents. He undergoes a sports medical evaluation aimed at granting sports fitness, but the outcome of the visit is inexorable: the diagnosis is genetic cardiomyopathy with a high risk of sudden death during an effort. It is the same disease that caused the premature death of many great athletes. Luca is forced to say goodbye to athletics and the future he had imagined for himself. He is desperate and disappointed. In an instant he saw all his dreams shatter when faced with a diagnosis of heart disease. He cannot understand, at least at that moment, that his life has been saved.
Unfortunately, Luca’s story is not isolated and precisely to give an answer to young aspiring athletes who see sport as a reason for living diagnosed with a serious heart disease that the Ulss 2 Sports Medicine Complex Operative Unit, directed by dr Patrizio Sarto, he created the project “The second time of Julian Ross”. To explain the initiative, on the eve of World Sports Day on April 6, Dr. Sarto: “We gave the project the name of a famous character from the Japanese manga Capitan Tsubasa (better known in Italy as Holly and Benji), created by Yoichi Takahashi. Julian Ross, like many young people we see, finds himself at some point experiencing the conflict between the diagnosis of heart disease and the desire to continue playing football. It is to these situations that our project wants to give an answer, guaranteeing the taking in charge of those who, from one day to the next, as an athlete find themselves a patient suffering from genetic cardiomyopathy or congenital heart disease. The diagnosis – explains Sarto – is followed by an in-depth path, which very often also involves the parents of the youngest athletes. The aim is to “reactivate” the athlete-patient in full autonomy or in one of the local Health Gyms, through a precise personalized training program “.
The goal is to avoid “abandoning” more or less young sportsmen who, following the sports-medical evaluation screening, are forced to deal with the diagnosis of a serious heart disease which can also cause sudden death from exertion.
“To date, more than 40 athletes-patients have enrolled in the program and more than 60 parents who had to be screened to reach the definition of this pathology – comments Dr. Sarto -. A drastic change, a communication difficult to accept, a suspension of pure competition. However, already in the “interval” the athletes-patients, in such a delicate phase, are taken in charge and followed step by step in the new path, dedicated to identifying the most suitable physical activity for them. After the in-depth diagnostic phase, a functional assessment is carried out, necessary for defining the ad hoc training program which is started directly in the Sports Medicine gym of the Prevention Department. At this point the “second half” can begin: hearts in motion, still on the pitch, anyway ».
The project does not neglect the psycho-social implications that the diagnosis triggers: the path of psychological support extended to the family is activated, given that in many clinical cases the cardiological pathology is associated with the transfer of a genetic alteration by a parent. Furthermore, the project includes a BLS (Basic Life Support) course, dedicated to family members, in collaboration with 118 Suem Treviso, which teaches how to cope with emergencies, including the possibility of cardiac arrest. The aim of the project is also to raise awareness, through various forms of communication, of the community on a subject so delicate that it can revolutionize the life of a sportsman.