Young rising sport stars at Loughborough College have been boosting their heart health knowledge and skills with expert advice and training to mark 2018 SADS Awareness Week (1-5 October).
Students on the College’s Talented Athlete Support Scheme (TASS) Dual Career Programme were given an insight into SADS or sudden arrhythmic death syndrome by Dr Ffion Davies, who is consultant in emergency medicine at Leicester’s hospitals and medical advisor to the Joe Humphries Memorial Trust (JHMT).
The charity was established to raise awareness of a group of genetic heart conditions which cause a disturbance with the heart rhythm and can lead to sudden cardiac arrest, following the death of local teenager Joe Humphries in 2012 from SADS while on a training jog near his Rothley home.
Every week, 12 young people (12-35 years old) die in the UK due to undiagnosed heart conditions and a study reported in the British Medical Journal showed sudden cardiac death to be the leading cause of death in athletes.
“We specialize in offering the young athletes on our Dual Career Programme the chance to balance the demands of their education with performance sport, enabling them to excel in both – and helping them stay safe is a key part of our support,” said Sport tutor Steve Wilkinson, who heads the Programme at Loughborough College.
“We are very grateful to Dr Davies, Alan White, Steve Humphries and JHMT for helping to raise our students’ awareness of heart health and giving them crucial training in CPR as well as in the use of a defibrillator.
“We have four on campus and having the skills to use these, or any defibrillator, together with CPR can make a difference not only to fellow athletes who may be vulnerable but also in having an impact generally on the many thousands of potentially survivable sudden heart deaths.”
Pictured: Rising sport stars on Loughborough College’s TASS Dual Career Programme boosted their heart health knowledge and skills with the help of the Joe Humphries Memorial Trust during 2018 SADS Awareness Week