Sure. As far as screening all athletes for cardiac disease, they definitely need to have an adequate history physical exam, but as far as doing advanced screening on every athlete, the debate and the jury is kind of still out on whether this is beneficial or not. There's too many what if's in this situation. Part of it is we don't know if it's beneficial. There's tremendous cost that's involved with screening every single athlete, and we don't know if the benefits truly outweigh the risks of screening everyone, because if we really screen everyone, the false positives can be too high. Then we're removing a lot of athletes or kids from their competitions that may not truly have problems ... It's going to lead to a lot of additional cost.
Anyone who has red flags, such as abnormal family history, abnormal personal history, any symptoms such as chest pain during exertion, fainting spells, passing out after or during competition, chest pain or dizziness with competition ... Those are things that definitely should warrant some advanced screening, such as at least an electrocardiogram, if not further evaluation with a cardiologist.
