Running and the Media: Take with a pinch of salt

This week we have seen several shocking stories and editorials in the public media relating to sport and exercise. The one that really caught my attention was the BBC's reporting of a medical paper published today in the European Heart Journal. It had the captivating headline 'Marathon training may pose a heart risk'. Wow, I had to read further, here is some quotes from the article.

Doing extreme endurance exercise, like training for a marathon, can damage the heart, research reveals.

They stress that their findings should not be taken to mean that endurance exercise is unhealthy.In the study, the scientists studied the athletes a fortnight before their races, immediately after their races and then about a week later.

Immediately after the race, the athletes' hearts had changed shape. The right ventricle - one of the four chambers in the heart involved in pumping blood around the body - appeared dilated and didn't work as well as it had been in the weeks leading up to the race.

Levels of a chemical called BNP, made by the heart in response to excessive stretching, increased.

A week later, most of the athletes' hearts had returned to the pre-race condition. But in five who had been training and competing for longer than the others, there were signs of scarring of the heart tissue and right ventricular function remained impaired compared with the pre-race readings.

I downloaded the article from my university library as I thought it would be an interesting read. I'm not a medic or a cardiologist, but I am a marathoner. Some of the article is too highly technical for me to understand, I've noted the following points.

• There were 40 participants who had finished in the top 25%, for example the marathoners were all sub 3 hours (m:2h59, SD:+-30) the iron man competitors were sub 10 h 52 mins (SD:1h 16). As much as I love my running friends, very few of them are in the top 25%, these athletes were well above average.
• They underwent intense training for more than 10 hours per week: so do most people training for an event such as an ironman! 
• Only 7 were just marathon runners, with an average age of 38.
• Participants took part in only one event and were tested before event, immediately after and between 6-11 days after. 
• One of the measures used had severe limitations and had been deemed by a panel of experts to be 'too unreliable' to be used as a diagnostic criteria. 
• The study does SUGGEST the IDEA that the right ventricle might be more susceptible to exercise induced injury, but surely every part of your body is susceptible to injury after a marathon or endurance event.
• The authors admit their study size is too small to really have any clinical validity (only 5 participants showed an abnormality post race), and suggests that in order to have better insight into this possible finding a larger scale study should be conducted.

 Everyone who takes part in an endurance event, marathon, sportive, triathlon knows the risks to themselves:physical (injury, illness), psychological and sometimes risks to relationships with others! For me the personal benefits of training for a challenging event such as a marathon far outweigh the risks. If I'm going to have an untimely early demise, I'd quite like it to be post race though, after it's all about the medal.

I seriously hope that this very small piece of research doesn't put people off running marathons. We need research and we need answers, this study provides but a tiny, tiny glimpse .

Disclaimer: I am not a Doctor but a runner who has an arrhythmia :o) These views are my own.