news-record.com

Two recent deaths of area student athletes may be making parents worried. Will their own children succumb during a game or even a practice? While statistics show that such occurrences are rare, some parents may still be uneasy, even after their sports-playing child has passed the required physical examination.

After all, look at 15-year-old Khalid Prince, who collapsed during a junior-varsity basketball game in Forsyth County and died Dec. 6. He had passed two physicals and had no known medical conditions. It was only after his death that an autopsy discovered that he suffered from myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle.

The cause of death is still to be determined for Rasheed Deshazor, 10, who died shortly after collapsing during Pittsylvania County Youth Basketball practice Monday.

While it's inevitable that such tragedies will happen, that doesn't mean that there's nothing parents or the larger community can do to try to prevent them. Here are three ideas that could save students' lives:

* See if your child's school has a defibrillator. If it doesn't, help it buy one. Greensboro Day School has these devices, and one saved the life of student Chris Dalldorf earlier this year. Dalldorf had collapsed during a game of Battle Ball, and a defibrillator shocked his heart into a life-sustaining rhythm.

* If heart problems run in your family, consider talking with your physician about tests beyond the standard physical for your athletic child.

* Take community action. Student athletes in the Atlanta area have extra protection because of Smart Heart Scans for Athletes. The nonprofit program sends a mobile unit to schools to run echocardiograms for Hypertropic Cardiomyopathy, found in more than one-third of the athletes who died because of Sudden Cardiac Death. Costs run about $65 per test, a fraction of the usual cost, for students choosing to participate. How about such a program in the Triad? (See smartheartscans.com)

It bears repeating: Sudden deaths of student athletes happen rarely. Still, why not take action to avoid them?