The Refined criteria have been adopted by the sports cardiologists who perform preparticipation screening for the English Football Association and other UK athletic organizations. But Dr. Malhotra and his coinvestigators also tested a further refinement of the Refined criteria in the adolescent soccer players and found it further improved the results. The refinement involved incorporation of one element of the Seattle criteria, which deems T wave inversion in the V1 and V2 leads as normal in all athletes.
When Dr. Malhotra and colleagues applied this additional refinement to the study cohort of more than 10,000 elite adolescent soccer players, they found the updated Refined criteria reduced the overall abnormal ECG rate from 2.9% to 2.1% while maintaining a specificity in excess of 96% for the detection of serious cardiac pathology. These updated Refined criteria will soon be routinely used in preparticipation screening for the Football Association’s youth development program, he added.
Session co-chair Dr. John A. Spertus was favorably impressed.
“This is really terrific work. Congratulations. I love studies that declare and define waste in effort and resources, and worry for patients, and can eliminate that,” said Dr. Spertus, professor of medicine and director of cardiovascular education and outcomes research at the Mid America Heart Institute and University of Missouri, Kansas City.
The American Academy of Pediatrics and other U.S. medical societies do not routinely recommend a preparticipation ECG at this time, but rather a preparticipation physical evaluation involving a targeted history and physical exam available at www.aap.org by searching “ppe-4 forms.”
This study was funded by Cardiac Risk in the Young and the English Football Association. Dr. Malhotra reported having no financial conflicts of interest.