The HHT and Afib Athlete

The Athlete part of the “HHT and AFib Athlete" In case you didn’t guess, the athlete part was very tongue in cheek! I liked sport at school but was always the slightly tubby one who was picked second from last for sports teams (S., frail, Indian, wore glasses, was always picked after me). I liked doing sport a lot but was singularly bad at everything – I used to walk as much as I ran in cross-country; barely made the gap between the runway and the long jump pit; once hit the high jump bar so hard I had a haematoma the size of an elephant on my leg and could hardly walk; fell over a hurdle so badly I was scared to try again. Netball was okay because I was so tall but I was always Goal Defence which meant you didn’t really have to move. Think an oak tree wearing a tabard… I once tried out when our school was desperate for three netball teams for a tournament (so 7 players and 2 subs per team – grand total of 27 players needed). About thirty girls tried out…. I wasn’t picked ☹...

What is HHT? Most readers will come to this post from AFib forums and FB pages methinks.   And so, the title “HHT and AFib athlete” will be a bit mysterious to them. HHT is a common rare disease!   Yes, I know that is an oxymoron.   One person in 50,000 is diagnosed with it but campaigners believe 10 times that number may have it (i.e., 1:5,000).   So, in Britain that would mean about 1340 diagnosed cases but 13,400 undiagnosed! Here’s one scientific explanation of the condition from the Internet:   Hereditary Haemorrhagic Telangiectasia HHT is a hereditary, autosomal dominant disease of the blood vessels, which means that children of HHT patients have a 50% chance of inheriting the disease. Hereditary Haemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT or Rendu Osler Weber disease) is a relatively rare disease, and as a consequence, doctors often have little experience or knowledge of the disease. It is a complex disorder involving both a genetic susceptibility ...