Like father, unlike son: Athletes and undiagnosed heart conditions

Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis. Loyola Marymount basketball star Hank Gathers. Damien Nash of the Denver Broncos. Olympic gold-medal skater Sergei Grinkov. Atlanta Hawks center Jason Collier.

All these top athletes died from heart failure while young and in their prime.

Tim Cox didn’t want that to happen to his son, Tim Cox, Jr., a top high school basketball and football player. The athlete’s grandfather had a thickening of the heart muscle (HCM, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) and had died at 63, and Tim, Senior had had an electrocardiogram (EKG) showing the same condition. The athlete’s parents prevailed on the young sports star to have an EKG, and it came back positive.

They and the cardiologist had to have a series of tough conversations with their son, who lives to play sports. Tim, Jr. no longer plays competitively. He’ll never help his basketball team get to the state tournament. His parents even wonder if they did the right thing. But what if they hadn’t had him tested and his heart had failed? "How could we have lived with ourselves?!" asked his mother.

Advice to athletes: Ask your doctor to give you a physical exam with the inexpensive 12-point screening recommended by the American Heart Association, which has eight questions and four simple tests.

Read another of our athlete stories, or read Gretchen Reynolds’ source story in the New York Times of June 3.

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.