Medicine, diagnostic imaging increasingly central to athletes’ safety

The frontier of cardiology is applied to sports, and in particular to athletes’ responses to cardiac stress. The dramatic and recent cases of cardiac problems found during competitions have rekindled the debate on the health of athletes and on the potential of medicine to read risks in advance and identify solutions. This will also be discussed on October 25 in Rome with Gianfranco Gualdi, scientific director of the Diagnostic Imaging service of the Institute of Medicine and Sports Sciences of Coni, who will give a report on the “modifications that can occur in athletes subjected to competitive activity involving cardiac structures with identification of the thin margin between physiological and pathological in order to ascertain their sports suitability”. The intervention is included in the 21st Romacuore 2024 Congress, organized by the Federal College of Cardiology which will have as its central theme ‘the role of advanced imaging in sports suitability: between physiology and pathology’.

The latest medical discoveries on acute and chronic post-traumatic shoulder instability in athletes will be described during the 107th National Congress of Siot, the Italian Society of Orthopedics and Traumatology. The event, scheduled to take place in Rome from 29 to 31 October, will include a speech by Gualdi, who draws on his experience in the sports sector. Starting from the changes involving the anatomical structures of the shoulder, in his speech, the professor, former director of the Complex Operating Unit of Emergency Radiology at the Policlinico Umberto I in Rome, will aim to demonstrate the alterations that can occur in the ligament and tendon structures, as well as in the cartilage and bone heads and muscle structures.