Exercise testing for the symptomatic athlete

Abstract

Many physicians consider exercise tolerance testing for athletes to be counterintuitive in that these individuals routinely perform high-level activity that would stress the cardiovascular system. However, numerous case reports of high-level athletes experiencing cardiac death have underscored the importance of identifying the athlete with symptoms that warrant evaluation. An additional challenge of deciding who merits testing is the labeling of individuals as athletes and the differentiation between symptoms of physiologic stress and pathophysiology. © 2009 Springer New York.