Extreme Exercise Can Harm Girls' Health

Female Athlete Triad Can Slowly Damage Body

CLEVELAND -- For some athletes, especially young women, the drive to be perfect comes with risks.

Most people haven't heard of female athlete triad. In Wednesday's On Your Side health report, NewsChannel5 explains how it slowly damages a healthy woman's body.

Grace, beauty and athleticism are words that describe many female athletes. But striving to be that way can backfire.

"Athletes listen to their coaches, and not all coaches are educated," Heather Gollnack said.

Gollnack grew up in the gym, doing whatever her coach ordered.

"It was, 'You're fat; you need to lose weight,'" she said. "We had ice cream for dinner, and then we didn't eat anything else."

The poor eating habits and extreme exercise may have caused serious damage.

Gollnack developed amenorrhea, which means that her periods stopped. Doctors know that it leads to osteoporosis, but new findings suggest more dangers.

"They're actually inducing a state similar to menopause," sports physician Dr. Anne Zeni Hoch said. "Their risk of heart disease goes up significantly when they don't have the protective effect of estrogen anymore."

Hoch compared the blood vessels of athletes with amenorrhea to those of healthy athletes.

"We found (that) yes, the women who were not having their periods had definite stiffening of their arteries compared to the women who were having normal periods," she said.

But there are treatments available.

"If you treat older women with estrogen, their blood vessels return to normal," Hoch said. "Now we hope that will happen with the girls in our study."

For Hoch, the findings hold a special interest. When she's not helping other athletes, she trains for triathlons herself.

She expects to have the results of the estrogen study next year. She said that young athletes, especially in their critical teen years, need plenty of calcium and iron in their diet.

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