Can We Provide Safe Training and Competition for All Athletes? From Mobile Heart Monitoring to Side Effects of Performance-Enhancing Drugs and MicroRNA Research

摘要

The foundations of sports cardiology include promoting physical activity and an ability to provide a safe environment for training and competition for all athletes at all levels, from professional to recreational. To combine these two aims, reliable tools to perform pre-participation screening are needed. Moreover, those at high risk of potentially life-threatening events should be advised to limit their training load, while others should be reassured that there is no exercise-related cardiovascular risk. We currently observe an advent of new portable devices for remote and mobile heart monitoring and several new, promising biochemical markers, which can support athletes’ diagnostic processes. In this Special Issue of the Diagnostics journal entitled “Diagnostic Challenges in Sports Cardiology”, we present a series of 13 manuscripts, including eight original works, three reviews, and two case reports, which give a glimpse of the current research topics in the area of sports cardiology.