[8] Sudden cardiac death (SCD) is a very rare event but particularly tragic affecting apparently healthy young or early middle-aged people.

Sudden cardiac death occurs in approximately one per 100,000 young athletes per year, generally in matches or training, but also occasionally at rest.

[14] Football (soccer) provides the highest number of young athletes who suffer cardiac arrest, being a medium risk sport that is played extensively worldwide.

Nevertheless, because of the fear of SCD and occupational requirement to train and compete at extremely high intensity in professional and elite sport, screening is established as a standard of care in many countries of the world.

[17] The country with the most established program of screening for cardiac disease in athletes is Italy, which requires this to be done by law.

[18] Some experts question whether the rate may have been reduced through other means, and whether the disqualification of many young people from playing vigorous sport annually is worth it.

[23] A major charity in the UK is Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY) which performs regular screenings.

Making sure that there are sufficiently trained medical, paramedical and other trained staff or volunteers at sporting events, ready availability of AEDs or ambulances or both, and that those qualified people are ready to respond to an arrest, probably leads to a greater lowering of the rates of sudden cardiac death in sport than any other measure.

Hence, having an excellent understanding of the parameters of safe event planning is a core subject in Sports Cardiology.

[25] Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) or HOCM (O = obstructive) is considered the most common cause of sudden cardiac death in young athletes that may be preventable.

However, the difficulty is that it overlaps with the more Athlete Heart syndrome and vast majority of discovered cases are mild, making it unclear about whether it is safe to continue playing intense sport.