The United States is dotted with charities named for teen athletes who died on the field of play from undiagnosed heart problems.
Despite a surge in free or low-cost cardiac testing from such groups, the incidence of sudden cardiac death among teen athletes hasn't budged in decades.
Now a Minnesota company, inspired by the 2014 death of an Eagan hockey player, is teaming up with a retired Mayo Clinic cardiologist to implement what it calls a new test to accurately rule out the 10 most common heart problems for a fraction of the typical $4,000-plus cost of a comprehensive cardiac screening.
"A diagnostic test is looking for disease. We're flipping that upside down and confirming that you are normal, because 98 percent of the kids that walk in should have normal features," said Tim Webert, founder and president of Eden Prairie's PraeVeni (pronounced "pray-venny"), which offers preventive heart screenings advertised online for $100. "If all the features are normal, we are ruling out the abnormalities that people are concerned with."
Sudden cardiac death remains a top killer of teen athletes, affecting about 3 in every 100,000. Physicians consider it a rare condition involving 75 to 100 deaths per year. One such victim was Patrick Schoonover, a hockey player from Eagan who died from undiagnosed heart defects at age 14 after collapsing on the ice during a Bantam AA game in Brainerd in November 2014.
Schoonover's parents run a charitable foundation in Patrick's name, which has conducted eight free screening events at Twin Cities schools that checked 1,400 athletes and their siblings for heart problems.
Such foundations provide cardiac screenings to about 100,000 teens per year around the country, according to a national coalition called Screen Across America, and some proponents say every kid in America should get screened.
Effectiveness questioned
But the medical establishment takes a dim view of mass cardiac screenings.