Marathon running: small or increased risk for cardiac arrest?

Excerpt

On Thursday 12 January 2012, the headline of ACC News Digest reports that the Risk of cardiac arrest for marathon participants may be very small. This news sounds very reassuring and stimulating for participants in marathons. However, one day later, Friday 13 January, the Dutch Newspaper NRC Handelsblad publishes the following scoop: An increasing number of individuals die during marathon running. By contrast, this news sounds alarming and discouraging rather than stimulating for marathon runners. Initially, my perception was that both news facts were based on different studies. However, the data proved to be based on the same study, published 12 January in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM 2012;366:130–140) by the Race Associated Cardiac Arrest Event Registry (RACER) Study Group, chaired by Kim et al. from Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA [1]. So what is the true news here. Let us therefore a take a deeper look into the study itself. …