A surgeon quarterback turned Samaritan: Heart disease prevention

Dr. Arthur Roberts’ story:

At age 58, he had long since hung up his NFL Dolphins jersey and heart surgeon’s scrubs. “I still had the athlete’s mentality, where you think you’re indestructible.” But the record-setting Columbia University quarterback wasn’t following his own advice about exercising and eating well, and he suffered a stroke six years ago.

Feeling lucky and grateful, he set up the Living Heart Foundation, with funding from the NFL players union. He’s trying to prevent deaths like those of Reggie White—the Hall of Fame defensive lineman who died at 43 from cardiac arrhythmia—and of lesser-known athletes like Kevin Mitchell, at age 36,from a massive heart attack, and Johnny Perkins, at age 54, of complications after heart surgery.

Kevin Guskiewicz, the Director of the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina, explains, “the retired athlete can’t exercise because of the injuries he’s sustained and the pain he is in, and that leads to higher weight depression, bad eating habits, high blood pressure, and so on.” Guskiewicz calls this the Snowball Effect, which he discovered through studying 27,000 retired football players.

Advice to spouses of retired athletes: Get your coach’s whistle and have your spouse lift hand weights during every TV commercial during the game.

Read another of our football stories, or Harvey Araton’s source story, “Brush with Death Puts a Doctor on a Mission,” in today’s New York Times, page C-16.