What 7 Feet Tall Isaiah Austin Having Marfan Syndrome Suggest To Professional Basketball Players

So I was not able to write much in the last 2 weeks due to a combination of issues: legal, technical, and health related. Hopefully most of those issues have been resolved.

The news that is making the rounds in the NBA and the basketball world in the last 2 days is that Current Baylor University’s Basketball Center and NBA Draft hopeful Isaiah Austin was diagnosed with Marfan’s Syndrome. It might be surprising news for some people but for people like me, it was almost sort of expected.

I became aware of Austin for a couple years now since I am a fan of basketball. It is always interesting to see what types of players are coming up in the annual NBA Drafts. Austin was a potential game changer for the NBA team who would draft him for his amazing length. When I first saw this kid, who was obviously tall, it did strike me as a little strange that a person would be as skinny as him, even for the ectomorphic body shape of most professional basketball players. Add in the fact that he always wore plastic goggles, and it just made him look slightly strange. It would turn out that he lost the use of one of his eyes in recent years due to a detached retina stem.

I have been aware of Marfan Syndrome for a long time, ever since I was doing research on the various genetic pathologies which can lead to tall stature like Klinefelter Syndrome, Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, Proteus Syndrome, the condition affecting the late Siah Khan and Zech Devits,  and Marfans and found pictures and threads on TheTallestMan.com forums suggesting that Abraham Lincoln most likely had Marfan Syndrome. Lincoln was shown to have the average length of torso but his legs and arms were very disproportionally long. When Lincoln would sit down, his sitting height would be the same as most men of his time.

If I paid more attention to the videos on Isaiah Austin and how his body looked, I would have been able to diagnose him within a minute of having Marfan. However, since he is not playing professional sports yet, there was only a small handful of videos on this kid.

His body shape is similar to what we see in other super sized humans like Mamadou N’Diaye and Shagari Alleyne, who have more than just height but also unusually long wingspans. While N’Diaye has been diagnosed only this year with having an overactive pituitary gland condition, I am not sure if anyone has checked Alleyne yet. There are people who are tall from genetics and others who have become large due to a medical condition or genetic mutation.

It is a good thing that at least these days all prospects who want to play professional basketball are required to also get a full body physical and even blood work done to check for some hidden/unknown genetic predisposition towards some type of illness. Marfan Syndrome is one of those illnesses which are a type of silent killer. The syndrome causes connective tissue to be lossened, thus the extra height, but also the muscle tissue around the body.

The general medical concern is that the muscles that makes up the arteries and/or aorta is enlarged. If the body of the player playing a high intensity level physical stressful game gets pushed too much, that region of the heart can actually rupture, instantly killing the person from the loss of blood and internal bleeding.

Apparently Austin went to get an standard EKG (Electro Cardio Gram) and there seemed to have been some type of abnormality in the rhythm of the heartbeat noticed on the graph. Further tests showed he had marfan.

What all this news indicates is that there is a very good chance that a shocking high percentage of the people who player professional basketball have marfan syndrome, and they just don’t know it.

Generally, people who are above average in height are pushed into playing the sport. I would suspect that maybe even 1 out of 100 people who play professional basketball of any team in any country suffer from the disorder, but they just don’t realize it. This news that has come out should be a sign that people who notice that maybe their body is ectomorphic or have a very thin torso should get themselves checked out. They don’t have to be 7 feet tall like Austin but if they have that unique body shape, it would be a good sign to do something. The regular checkup with the GP (General Practitioner) is not enough since the family doctor and the nurses using even the best regular stethescope or Sphygmomanometer would be able to catch a heart murmur or rhythm irregularity.