Exercise is healthy, but prolonged and very frequent exercise at very high intensity may have potential adverse health effects. This dissertation examined the two most prevalent adverse effects on heart and vessels: the release of troponin, a biomarker for heart damage, after exercise, and coronary artery calcification in middle-aged athletes. This is the accumulation of fat, cholesterol, and calcium in the blood vessels that supply the heart whit oxygen-rich blood. A large field study with over 1,000 participants showed that troponin levels rise after exercise in almost everyone. New reference values for troponin after exercise, which previously did not exist, were found to be more than four times higher than the normal resting reference values. With these new sport-specific reference values, troponin would be much less frequently elevated after exercise. Two smaller studies showed that coronary artery calcification is common in middle-aged athletes, but that there appears to be no association between coronary artery calcification and troponin release after exercise.
Sylvan (1994) obtained his Master’s degree in medicine at the Radboud University in 2021, after which he started with his PhD research as part of the Exercise Physiology research group at the Department of Medical BioSciences of the Radboudumc. Currently, he is working as a physician at the department of Internal Medicine in the Canisius-Wilhelmina Hospital in Nijmegen.