The Effect of Strenuous Exercise on Coagulation.

Many studies have shown that vigorous exercise increases the risk of developing vascular thrombotic events and can result in sudden death during or immediately after exercise. The outcome of these studies is biased by several confounding variables: subjects, type of exercise, duration, intensity and especially the method used for the evaluation of the hemostatic capacity. The goal of our study is to investigate the effect of strenuous exercise with the Calibrated Automated Thrombogram (CAT) assay, which is an established tool in detecting hyper- and hypocoagulabilty conditions. We modified the CAT assay to make it also feasible to measure TG in whole blood (WB-CAT), not only to go one step closer to physiology since all the blood cells are present, but also to avoid the centrifugation step. With our study we would like to see whether the other blood cells also play a role in the increase in TG. The objective is to investigate the effect of strenuous exercise (participation to the Amstel Gold Race) on coagulation and haemostatic parameters. We hypothesize that strenuous exercise induces a prothrombotic phenotype and that especially the tests involving blood cells will be altered into a prothrombotic phenotype.