Towards a Multidisciplinary Approach of ECG Screening in Children and Adolescents: A Scoping Review (2005–2025)

Background: The reported data on ECG screening are focused on the last two decades.
The objectives of this review were bifold: (i) to identify, within a timespan of twenty years,
the most recent literature data on cardiac screening in children and adolescents and (ii) to
provide data on the procedures used. Methods: Queries were conducted using PubMed,
Scopus, and Google Scholar databases for the time window of 2005–2025. The mesh terms
used were “ECG”, “Universal Screening”, “Cardiac Pathologies”, “Heart Rate”, and
“Sports Pre-participation Evaluation”. Only research articles and review papers were included.
The standard English language filter was used. Successively, only research articles
were selected. Results: Data from 14 papers were considered, reflecting the lack of information
about subjects < 16 years of age. Conclusions: The information on objective ECG
screening measures is quite scarce, and it is an urgent need to introduce a multidisciplinary
approach to differentiate between ECG physiological changes due to growth and
ECG pathological changes due to early pathology.