Ramon Margalef Prize: A groundbreaking research on cardiovascular health
This yearʼs Ramon Margalef Prize of the Board of Trustees to the best article published in a distinguished journal in the field of experimental and health sciences from a doctoral thesis, which honours the researcher Begoña Benito, has been awarded to a breaking research. In particular, this is a research opposing the previous concept on physical activity at any level being healthy. This study was published in a high-impact journal on cardiology, Circulation, and it shows how continuous endurance sport for years could cause alterations in the cardiac structure and function and create a substrate for arrhythmia.
This yearʼs Ramon Margalef Prize of the Board of Trustees to the best article published in a distinguished journal in the field of experimental and health sciences from a doctoral thesis, which honours the researcher Begoña Benito, has been awarded to a breaking research. In particular, this is a research opposing the previous concept on physical activity at any level being healthy. This study was published in a high-impact journal on cardiology, Circulation, and it shows how continuous endurance sport for years could cause alterations in the cardiac structure and function and create a substrate for arrhythmia.
The objective of this study, which lasted five years, was to determine the long-term cardiac effects in an animal model, something which had not been studied so far at high levels of chronicity. Therefore, the team from the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona put a group of rats under a daily hour of intense exercise during four, eight and sixteen weeks -the latter representing an important model of chronicity that could be equal to a daily training during ten years in humans, and compared it to another group of sedimentary rats (control group). During this time, and only in those rats under sixteen weeks of training, researchers saw irregularities in the structure of the cardiac muscle (fibrosis) in rats under intense exercise, especially in the atrium and the right ventricle. This suggests there is a direct relation between the endurance effort which has occurred continuously with the probabilities of developing cardiac alterations that can favour a cardiac arrhythmia. This correlates with the clinical observations of a higher probability of suffering from atrial fibrillation in the long run in endurance training athletes. Also, cardiac fibrosis located in the ventricle, could be similar to that seen in some cases of ventricular arrhythmia in athletes. Moreover, the study shows that stopping the training after two, four and eight weeks results in an important remission of the cardiac anomaly, especially in the right ventricle.