Exercise and your Heart: risks and benefits

Exercise and your Heart: Risks and Benefits

It is generally understood that exercise and physical activity are important lifestyle factors that maintain the health of your heart and arteries and decrease the risk of the most prevalent and debilitating diseases in the Western World, namely heart disease, stroke and dementia. But distinct “doses” and types of exercise impact the benefits derived - and there may even be a risk in overdoing it. 

These talks, presented by the School of Human Sciences (Exercise and Sport Science) and the Institute of Advanced Studies at UWA, will address the relative risk and benefits of exercise across the lifespan.

Exercise and the heart: can you overdose?

Professor Keith George

The cardiovascular benefits of exercise are well known to nearly all of the global population.  Indeed some have called exercise the cardiovascular “polydrug”. If you could wrap exercise up into a pill you would makes billions of dollars and likely win a Nobel Prize.  But - if exercise were a drug it would be required to go through multiple levels of trials related to safety and efficacy – there is no FDA process for exercise.  Within this process we would ask questions like; (1) is there a linear dose-response curve between exercise volume and cardiovascular health benefit? (2) are there any negative side effects of exercise? and, (3) can you overdose on exercise? This talk will address current data in relation to cardiac dysfunction and damage associated with taking large acute doses of exercise.

Professor Keith George is Associate Dean for Research, Scholarship and Knowledge Transfer (Faculty of Science) and past Head of the Research Institute for Sport and Exercise Sciences at Liverpool John Moores University. His primary research focus has been on the impact of acute or chronic exercise on the heart and circulatory system. Much of his research has also related to the development and utilization on novel imaging technologies and their use in research and clinical settings. He is an expert attached to the Active Well-being Initiative and the Global Active City accreditations supported by TAFISA, EVALEO and the IOC. This comes from a history of association with Liverpool Active City and a range of collaborative partners across the city.

Professor George is a 2018 Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow. 

Screening Athletes to Avoid Sudden Cardiac Death

Dr David Oxborough

Sudden cardiac death (SCD) in a young, seemingly healthy, athlete is a devastating event with current data suggesting that between 1: 40,000 and 1: 100,000 athletes will die from an inherited cardiac disorder. In response to these tragic events, pre-participation cardiac screening has now become mandatory for many sporting organisations across the globe with the aim of identifying those athletes at risk. The athlete’s heart responds to exercise through physiological adaptation, however this normal response often creates a diagnostic challenge when attempting to differentiate from inherited cardiac disease. This talk will present the current data on SCD in athletes, highlight the conditions that are responsible and demonstrate how decades of research into the athlete’s heart have helped to improve the sensitivity and specificity of cardiac pre-participation screening.

Dr David Oxborough is a registered Clinical Cardiac Physiologist specialising in echocardiography. For the past 21 years he has worked in the NHS, private healthcare sectors and the cardiovascular screening environment  - Cardiac Risk in the Young, Spire Perform at St Georges Park (FA centre of excellence), the Centre for Human Health and Performance, London and Aspetar Sports Medical Hospital in Qatar. He is a Reader in Cardiovascular Physiology at Liverpool John Moores University where he actively researches the acute and chronic effects of exercise on cardiac structure and function.

Dr Oxborough is a 2018 Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.