Bove, the most important match: left ventricle injury, career in Italy at risk
The Fiorentina footballer is doing better and has been transferred from intensive care to the cardiology department. Monitored as a precaution, the doctor: "In our country you cannot play with an internal defibrillator"
Florence, 4 December 2024 – There is a risk that the Viola midfielder Edoardo Bove can no longer play football. He is fine now. From the intensive care unit for trauma and serious organ failure he was moved yesterday to the intensive care unit of the Cardiology department of Careggi, monitored as a precaution. The cycle of tests to arrive at a certain diagnosis continues. The player of the Viola club in the seventeenth minute of the Fiorentina-Inter match last Sunday had collapsed on the football field: immediately rescued, during the transport to the hospital he had suffered cardiac arrest due to ventricular fibrillation.
In misfortune, lucky. The AED did its job, the heart returned to beat normally: cardioverted in a few minutes without the brain suffering any damage. Before him the captain of Fiorentina Davide Astori, the Livorno midfielder Piermario Morosini they hadn't made it.
But why did it happen? The accurate magnetic resonance imaging investigation of the heart carried out on Monday would appear to have highlighted a lesion of the left ventricle. Which would also appear to have been present in the three magnetic resonances to which the footballer had been subjected since 2020 after having had post-Covid myocarditis. Now it will be the turn of genetic tests to give a name to the possible heart disease. It takes one to three months to identify possible alterations. The cause of the fibrillation, if the ventricular lesion is confirmed, would be clarified. While genetic tests have the task of identifying the reason why the lesion would have formed. It could be the scarring result of previous myocarditis or the expression of a congenital arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy on a genetic basis, the disease that also killed Astori and Morosini.
If the tests were to confirm the diagnostic suspicions, what consequences could there be for the footballer? “In that case, the cardiac arrest would have been a manifestation of an underlying cardiac pathology and would expose the athlete to potential relapses over time, consequently requiring the implantation of a secondary prevention defibrillator,” explains Professor Domenico Corrado, director of the Genetic Cardiomyopathies and Sports Cardiology Unit at the University of Padua, one of the world’s leading experts. And at a competitive level? “According to the national guidelines for Sports Medicine and Cardiology, athletes with a defibrillator are not eligible for competitive sports activity that could favor relapses that, even in the presence of a defibrillator, would remain potentially lethal events. Furthermore, competitive activity could favor the progression of the underlying structural heart disease, especially if it were to be a genetic cardiomyopathy.”