Evaluation of pre-participation screening and cardiovascular risk assessment in Masters athletes in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Middle-aged individuals (≥ 35 years) are exercising more and living longer. Vigorous exercise can transiently increase the risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD) in those with underlying cardiovascular disease (CVD). Pre-participation screening (PPS) can detect CVD. The optimal screening method in Masters athletes is unclear. Suggested methods include cardiovascular history questionnaire, physical examination, cardiovascular risk scores, resting electrocardiogram (ECG), exercise treadmill test (ETT), and imaging techniques. Purpose: To evaluate the prevalence of CVD and risk factors and the effectiveness of different screening methods for detecting cardiovascular risk in Masters athletes to prevent SCD in sport. To determine the prevalence of atrial fibrillation (AF) in Masters athletes, and its association with volume of activity. Methods: This is a prospective observational study that evaluated Masters athletes from a variety of sports. The initial screen consisted of a physical examination, a resting ECG, Framingham Risk Score (FRS), an American Heart Association (AHA) questionnaire, and a physical activity and lifestyle questionnaire. If the initial screen was abnormal, the participant went on for further evaluations according to criteria defined a priori. CVD was confirmed by follow-up examinations and a positive predictive value (PPV) determined the effectiveness of the screening tools. Results: A total of 297 athletes (67% male, mean age 54 ± 8.8, range 35-81 years) were included. The prevalence of CVD was 12% and 9% had a high FRS. CAD was the most frequent diagnosis (9%). Three (1%) athletes were diagnosed with AF. A high cardiovascular risk score was the most effective tool in detecting CAD (56% PPV), and the AHA questionnaire produced the greatest number of false-positives (82%). There was a greater prevalence of AF and valvular heart disease in those with greater volumes of physical activity. Conclusion: Physically fit, asymptomatic Masters athletes are not immune to cardiovascular risk factors and have significant CVD. Systematic screening amongst Masters athletes may be reasonable; however, more research is needed to refine the current PPS methods to better suit the Masters athlete population.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".