Schools

'Sudden Death:' Program Offers Free Heart Screening for High School Athletes

Dale Nickos loves to talk about his son, Tim. It’s a way of keeping his son present in his life.

Two years ago on June 28, 2011, Tim Nickos became one of 3,000 young adults who annually fall victim to sudden cardiac death, or SCD, in the United States, due to undetected heart abnormalities. The condition is particularly fatal in physically active teens and children.

Tim was due to enter his senior year at Oak Lawn Community High School. The 17-year-old swam the 500-meter race and was a distance swimmer for the varsity swim team. He played trumpet in the Spartan band. He taught young kids how to swim and liked to build racing engines in his grandfather’s shop.

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His family thought he was in peak physical condition, until the morning when his father went to wake him up and found that Tim had died in his sleep. An autopsy later revealed that his son had an enlarged heart or hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the leading cause of sudden cardiac death in young athletes.

“We never had a clue,” his father said.

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The sudden shocking death of high school and college athletes during sports activities, unfortunately, is becoming more prevalent in the United States, claiming about 60 young adults every week.

“It’s unimaginable having a child who is training and eating well to die suddenly,” said Joseph Marek, MD, a pediatric cardiologist at Advocate Children’s Hospital-Park Ridge. “The only way to prevent such sudden death from occurring is to identify problems before they occur.”

As sports practices get underway and kids go back to school, heart specialists from Advocate Children’s Hospital in Park Ridge and Oak Lawn are working with Dr. Marek in a program called Young Heats for Life.

The program, founded by Dr. Marek, provides EKG screenings to students in area high schools.

“Our intent is to identify young adults who may be at risk for sudden cardiac death so that they can get the proper attention and medical management and avoid a catastrophic outcome, especially during physical activity,” Dr. Marek said.

Screenings are offered onsite at local high schools. On the day of screening, students arrive in groups, typically during gym class or on their lunch hour. Students are administered electrocardiograms, commonly known as EKGs and ECGs, which take about four to five minutes each to perform.

After a physician reads the EKG results, a member of the Young Hearts for Life team contacts the family, usually by email, to share the results. If the results show abnormalities additional testing is done by the family doctor or a heart specialist.

Dr. Frank Zimmerman, director of pediatric electrophysiology at Advocate Children’s Hospital-Oak Lawn, advises that not just varsity athletes get screened, but all students involved at various levels of physical activity.

Dr. Zimmerman says that any student can have undetected heart abnormalities, such as irregular heartbeat or an arrhythmia.

“Those heart abnormalities can prove particularly life-threatening to the young athlete as the body produces an increased amount of adrenaline during the physical intensity of sports competition,” Dr. Zimmerman said. “If the young athlete already has a heart problem, the exertion can put the heart under too much stress, causing the body to go into shock, or result in a heart attack because of some blockage to the heart.”

The EKG tests cost $10 to perform, making it among the most cost-effective programs in the country. Screenings are funded by schools and communities.

“Heart abnormalities in young adults are not common, but they are not rare either,” Dr. Marek said.  “If we are going to have any kind of impact on reducing the number of sudden deaths among young people in this country, we are going to have to screen many students,” Dr. Marek said.

Young Hearts for Life is trying to do just that. To date, the program has performed more than 100,000 EKG tests for high school students.

The program also works with schools by assuring they have the correct number of automated external defibrillators and that defibrillators are available in the proper locations.

Heart screenings are not yet mandated by the IHSA as part of the high school sports physical examination. Until it is, the Advocate heart specialists say it's up to parents and the community to request it in schools.

Nickos believes that a heart screening would have saved his son’s life, allowing them to pull Tim out of high school sports. His son’s level of physical activity caused Tim’s heart to continue to grow.

“Kids will still have issues, but it will give them an opportunity to stay alive,” Nickos said. “They’ll have an opportunity to live instead of finding out in an autopsy.”

Photo: Tim Nickos, a swimmer at Oak Lawn Community High School, died in his sleep in June 2011. An autopsy revealed that he had an enlarged heart, a leading cause of sudden cardiac death in high school athletes. (Family photo)

Source: Advocate Children’s Hospital Park Ridge and Oak Lawn.





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