The Italian preparticipation evaluation programme: diagnostic yield, rate of disqualification and cost analysis

Introduction Italian law mandates that every competitive athlete must undergo annual preparticipation evaluation (PPE) to identify cardiovascular (CV) diseases that pose a risk of sudden death (SD) during sport and other conditions that may threaten the athlete’s health. We investigated the diagnostic yield, rate of disqualification and costs of our PPE. Methods We included 5910 consecutive apparently healthy athletes (61% males, mean age 15±4...