Title: The Importance of Doppler-echocardiography in the Assessment of the Athlete’s Heart
Abstract: Summarizing observations of several authors characteristics of the athlete’s heart can be divided into three groups: morphological characteristics, among which the most important modification of athlete’s heart is a marked left ventricular (LV) hypertrophy, functional characteristics, which could mean better systolic and diastolic function and regulatory characteristics, a higher parasympathetic and a lower sympathetic activity at rest, resulting mostly in a lower heart rate, lower cardiac output, circumferential shortening velocity (Pavlik et al. 2010). In the general medical practice LV hypertrophy is considered as a risk factor caused by some diseases as hypertension, obesity, cardiomyopathy, etc. To separate pathological and physiological hypertrophy the most important factors are functional and regulatory characteristics of the heart which can be mostly detected by Doppler-echocardiography.