Kareem Abdul-Jabbar remembers feeling like something was off.

"I started noticing symptoms about two or three years ago," he tells PEOPLE. "I was having irregular heartbeat, shortness of breath and had no energy or stamina. I couldn't walk more than 30 yards without having to sit down and rest to catch my breath."

When the symptoms went away, he dismissed them. "I thought it was a temporary issue," says the basketball legend, 75. "I had been an athlete and was in shape, so I felt it wasn't going to bother me for any length of time. But I was quite wrong."

A few months later he was at an Los Angeles Dodgers game when he started feeling ill. "I was sitting in the sun and the sun seemed to suck all of the air out of my chest," he says. "I tried to get up from my seat and head to my car and while people were helping me to my car, I collapsed and almost crashed into the Dodgers trophy case."

More here:

[people.com]

In 2005 here, we did an informal poll on whether people considered themselves tall, athletic or both. Here are the results (source):

M/F           #Responding  Athletic  Tall  Both
Female              15         11     7      7
Male                19         19    17     17
Total               34         30    24     24

I'm guessing that none of the people responding as "Tall" were anywhere near Kareem's 7'2". Quite a few pro basketball players with long careers ended up with afib.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/17/2023 07:56PM by GeorgeN.

That's some impressive 100% correlation. Tiny sample size and horribly non-random sample, of course, but I'd love to see a good study done on that using thousands of patients. It could be done entirely retrospectively based on anonymous patient records, so it would be cheap to do.

Quote
Carey
That's some impressive 100% correlation.

I think it is a reflection of the participants/members using this site at that point. "Lone Atrial Fibrillation" was the focus of the site & I think those folks tended to be more in the athletic category. From that time long ago, I recall some published data that tall folk were more subject to afib, at least the LAF variety. An example is this 2008 paper: Physical activity, height, and left atrial size are independent risk factors for lone atrial fibrillation in middle-aged healthy individuals.

Conclusions:
"Accumulated lifetime physical activity, height, and left atrial size are risk factors for LAF in healthy middle-aged individuals."