Researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia have found the first evidence that some athletes who take part in extreme endurance exercise like marathons and triathlons may incur damage to the right ventricles of their hearts – one of the four chambers in the heart involved in pumping blood around the body.
The research, published online in the European Heart Journal, found that although the damage was reversed within a week of a competitive event in most of the 40 athletes studied, five of them (13 percent) showed evidence of more permanent damage, with magnetic resonance imaging showing fibrosis, a scarring of the heart muscle.
Dr. André La Gerche, a postdoctoral research fellow, said: “It is most important that our findings are not over-extrapolated to infer that endurance exercise is unhealthy. Our data do not support this premise.”
However, he said that the findings did suggest that there might be some athletes who might have been born with a susceptibility to develop damage as a result of long-term endurance exercise.