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Scuba diving may pose CV risks for aging divers with overweight
Scuba diving fatalities are rare, but many divers are aging, overweight and/or have CV risk factors, and routine diving fitness assessments should be conducted to reduce mortality risk, researchers wrote in a review.
“Cardiac issues are now a leading factor in diving fatalities,” Peter Buzzacott, MPH, PhD, from the University of Western Australia, said in a press release. “Divers who learned to dive years ago and who are now old and overweight, with high blood pressure and high cholesterol, are at increased risk of dying.”
According to the review, adults aged 50 to 59 years accounted for 15% of diving fatalities in 1989, but 35% in 2015; those aged 60 to 69 years accounted for 5% of diving fatalities in 1989, but 20% in 2015; and cardiac events were the second leading cause of diving fatalities in 2015, behind drowning.
Buzzacott and colleagues analyzed data from the 2011, 2013 and 2015 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. They compared 113,892 Americans who identified scuba diving as their most or second most frequent activity (median frequency, once per week; mean duration, 2 hours) with 338,933 Americans who did not identify scuba diving as a frequent activity and were matched for age, sex and state of residence.
Mean BMI was 26.1 kg/m2 in the diver group and 27.3 kg/m2 in the control group (P < .0001).
Among the divers, 36% were aged 50 years or older, 47.9% were classified as overweight by BMI, 54% had smoked at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetime and 39.6% were former smokers, the researchers wrote.
Compared with controls, divers were more likely to be ever smokers (RR = 1.17; 95% CI, 1.15-1.18), more likely to be former smokers (RR = 1.23; 95% CI, 1.22-1.25), more likely to be overweight (RR = 1.09; 95% CI, 1.08-1.1) and less likely to have had a routine checkup in the past year (RR = 0.87; 95% CI, 0.86-0.88), Buzzacott and colleagues wrote.
In the diving group, 32.7% had been diagnosed with high BP and 30.1% had been diagnosed with high cholesterol, but these were not significantly different from the control group, according to the researchers.
Buzzacott said in the release that once a diver has received scuba certification, it is for life. “This is where we see an increase in risk,” he said. “It’s not commonly new divers who have health problems, because they have been recently screened. It is older divers who have not looked after their health. None of us are as young as we once were, and it is important that we stay in shape for diving. The father of scuba, Jacques Cousteau, was diving at 90 and the current world’s oldest diver is 94. He looks like he’s in great shape and that is the role model for us all if we want to keep diving into our senior years.” – by Erik Swain
Disclosure: The study was funded by the Divers Alert Network, of which Buzzacott is director of injury monitoring and prevention. The authors report no relevant financial disclosures.