Death on the Basketball Court

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“In 2004, Robert Eckart, a former Army cardiologist now at the Heart Specialists of Sarasota, published a study showing that military recruits in populations that are similar to college athletes—male and female exercisers, eighteen to thirty-five years old—carry a risk of S.C.D. of roughly one in fifteen thousand, about twenty times higher than previous studies had reported. There is good reason to believe that these military numbers reflect reality more accurately than studies of athletes: Eckart’s findings used a military database, where all deaths must be catalogued and reported, whereas previous researchers, investigating S.C.D. in athletes, had to rely mostly on media reports and newspaper clippings.”